Using transactional execution for reliability and recovery of transient failures

ABSTRACT

Executing each portion of a stream of program instructions as a transaction for reliability, a computer system supporting transactional execution mode processing is provided. Included is determining that an instruction in a portion of the stream of program instructions begins a transaction; based on beginning the transaction, saving a snapshot of system state information and executing the portion of the stream of program instructions as a transaction until an end-mode test point in the stream of program instruction is reached. Based on reaching the end-mode test point, committing store data of the transaction to memory; and based on the stream of program instructions not being complete, automatically beginning a new transaction of a next portion of the stream of program instructions or based on aborting the transaction, re-executing the transaction based on the saved snapshot of the system state information.

BACKGROUND

This disclosure relates generally to transactional memory systems andmore specifically to a method, computer program and computer system forrecovering from transient failures by using transactions.

The number of central processing unit (CPU) cores on a chip and thenumber of CPU cores connected to a shared memory continues to growsignificantly to support growing workload capacity demand. Theincreasing number of CPUs cooperating to process the same workloads putsa significant burden on software scalability; for example, shared queuesor data-structures protected by traditional semaphores become hot spotsand lead to sub-linear n-way scaling curves. Traditionally this has beencountered by implementing finer-grained locking in software, and withlower latency/higher bandwidth interconnects in hardware. Implementingfine-grained locking to improve software scalability can be verycomplicated and error-prone, and at today's CPU frequencies, thelatencies of hardware interconnects are limited by the physicaldimension of the chips and systems, and by the speed of light.

Implementations of hardware Transactional Memory (HTM, or in thisdiscussion, simply TM) have been introduced, wherein a group ofinstructions—called a transaction—operate in an atomic manner on a datastructure in memory, as viewed by other central processing units (CPUs)and the I/O subsystem (atomic operation is also known as “blockconcurrent” or “serialized” in other literature).. The transactionexecutes optimistically without obtaining a lock, but may need to abortand retry the transaction execution if an operation, of the executingtransaction, on a memory location conflicts with another operation onthe same memory location. Previously, software transactional memoryimplementations have been proposed to support software TransactionalMemory (TM). However, hardware TM can provide improved performanceaspects and ease of use over software TM.

U.S. Patent Application Publication US20080244354 A1 titled “Apparatusand method for redundant multi-threading with recovery” filed 2007 Mar.28 and incorporated by reference herein teaches a method and apparatusfor reducing the effect of soft errors in a computer system is provided.Soft errors are detected by combining software redundant threading andinstruction duplication. Upon detection of a soft error, errors arerecovered through the use of software check pointing/rollbacktechnology. Reliable regions are identified by vulnerability profilingand redundant multi-threading is applied to the identified reliableregions.

U.S. Patent Application Publication US20120210162 A1 titled “Staterecovery and lockstep execution restart in a system with multiprocessorpairing” filed 2011 Feb. 15 and incorporated by reference herein teachesa system, method and computer program product for a multiprocessingsystem to offer selective pairing of processor cores for increasedprocessing reliability. A selective pairing facility is provided thatselectively connects, i.e., pairs, multiple microprocessor or processorcores to provide one highly reliable thread (or thread group). Eachpaired microprocessor or processor cores that provide one highlyreliable thread for high-reliability connect with a system componentssuch as a memory “nest” (or memory hierarchy), an optional systemcontroller, and optional interrupt controller, optional I/O orperipheral devices, etc. The memory nest is attached to a selectivepairing facility via a switch or a bus. Each selectively pairedprocessor core is includes a transactional execution facility, whereinthe system is configured to enable processor rollback to a previousstate and reinitialize lockstep execution in order to recover from anincorrect execution when an incorrect execution has been detected by theselective pairing facility.

SUMMARY

According to an embodiment of the disclosure, a method for executingeach portion of a stream of program instructions as a transaction forreliability, a computer system configured to support transactionalexecution mode processing may be provided. The method may includedetermining, by the computer system, that an instruction in a portion ofthe stream of program instructions may begin a transaction intransactional execution mode; based on beginning the transaction intransactional execution mode, saving, by the computer system, a snapshotof a system state information and executing, by the computer system, theportion of the stream of program instructions as a transaction until anend-mode test point in the stream of program instruction is reached.Based on reaching the end-mode test point in the stream of programinstructions, committing store data of the transaction to memory; andperforming, by the computer system, any one of:

a) Based on the stream of program instructions not being complete,automatically beginning a new transaction in transactional executionmode of a next portion of the stream of program instructions

b) Based on aborting the transaction, re-executing the transaction basedon the saved snapshot of the system state information.

In another embodiment of the disclosure, a computer program product forexecuting each portion of a stream of program instructions as atransaction for reliability, the computer program product may beprovided. The computer program product may include a computer readablestorage medium readable by a processing circuit and storing instructionsfor execution by the processing circuit for performing a methodincluding: determining, by the computer system, that an instruction in aportion of the stream of program instructions may begin a transaction intransactional execution mode; based on beginning the transaction intransactional execution mode, saving, by the computer system, a snapshotof a system state information and executing, by the computer system, theportion of the stream of program instructions as a transaction until anend-mode test point in the stream of program instruction is reached.Based on reaching the end-mode test point in the stream of programinstructions, committing store data of the transaction to memory; andperforming, by the computer system, any one of:

a) Based on the stream of program instructions not being complete,automatically beginning a new transaction in transactional executionmode of a next portion of the stream of program instructions

b) Based on aborting the transaction, re-executing the transaction basedon the saved snapshot of the system state information.

In another embodiment of the disclosure, a computer system for executingeach portion of a stream of program instructions as a transaction forreliability, the computer system may be provided. The computer systemmay include: a memory and a processor in communication with the memory,wherein the computer system is configured to perform a method, saidmethod including: determining, by the computer system, that aninstruction in a portion of the stream of program instructions may begina transaction in transactional execution mode; based on beginning thetransaction in transactional execution mode, saving, by the computersystem, a snapshot of a system state information and executing, by thecomputer system, the portion of the stream of program instructions as atransaction until an end-mode test point in the stream of programinstruction is reached. Based on reaching the end-mode test point in thestream of program instructions, committing store data of the transactionto memory; and performing, by the computer system, any one of:

a) Based on the stream of program instructions not being complete,automatically beginning a new transaction in transactional executionmode of a next portion of the stream of program instructions

b) Based on aborting the transaction, re-executing the transaction basedon the saved snapshot of the system state information.

BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE SEVERAL VIEWS OF THE DRAWINGS

One or more aspects of the present disclosed embodiments areparticularly pointed out and distinctly claimed as examples in theclaims at the conclusion of the specification. The foregoing and otherobjects, features, and advantages of the disclosed embodiment areapparent from the following detailed description taken in conjunctionwith the accompanying drawings in which:

FIG. 1 depicts an example multicore transactional memory environment, inaccordance with an illustrative embodiment;

FIG. 2 depicts en example multicore transactional memory environment, inaccordance with an illustrative embodiment;

FIG. 3 depicts example components of an example CPU, in accordance withan illustrative embodiment;

FIG. 4 depicts an exemplary schematic block diagram illustrating anerror checking mechanism within the data processing environment of FIG.9, in accordance with an embodiment of the disclosure;

FIG. 5 is a flowchart illustrating operations performed by a processorfor executing a transaction within a stream of program instructions andrecovering from a hardware fault using transactional executioncapabilities, illustrated within the data processing environment of FIG.9, in accordance with an embodiment of the disclosure;

FIG. 6 is a flowchart illustrating operations performed by a processorfor performing recovery actions for an error condition determined not tobe directly recoverable, illustrated within the data processingenvironment of FIG. 9, in accordance with an embodiment of thedisclosure;

FIG. 7 is a flowchart illustrating operations performed by a processorfor performing recovery actions for an error condition determined to notbe software recoverable, illustrated within the data processingenvironment of FIG. 9, in accordance with an embodiment of thedisclosure;

FIG. 8 is a flowchart illustrating operations performed by a processorfor dynamically creating transactional regions in an input instructionstream during instruction fetch, illustrated within the data processingenvironment of FIG. 9, in accordance with an embodiment of thedisclosure;

FIG. 9 is a schematic block diagram which illustrates internal andexternal components of a server computer in accordance with anillustrative embodiment; and

FIG. 10 depicts an exemplary flow for using transactional execution forreliability and recovery of transient failures.

DETAILED DESCRIPTION

Historically, a computer system or processor had only a single processor(aka processing unit or central processing unit). The processor includedan instruction processing unit (IPU), a branch unit, a memory controlunit and the like. Such processors were capable of executing a singlethread of a program at a time. Operating systems were developed thatcould time-share a processor by dispatching a program to be executed onthe processor for a period of time, and then dispatching another programto be executed on the processor for another period of time. Astechnology evolved, memory subsystem caches were often added to theprocessor as well as complex dynamic address translation includingtranslation lookaside buffers (TLBs). The IPU itself was often referredto as a processor. As technology continued to evolve, an entireprocessor could be packaged on a single semiconductor chip or die, sucha processor was referred to as a microprocessor. Then processors weredeveloped that incorporated multiple IPUs, such processors were oftenreferred to as multi-processors. Each such processor of amulti-processor computer system (processor) may include individual orshared caches, memory interfaces, system bus, address translationmechanism and the like. Virtual machine and instruction set architecture(ISA) emulators added a layer of software to a processor, that providedthe virtual machine with multiple “virtual processors” (aka processors)by time-slice usage of a single IPU in a single hardware processor. Astechnology further evolved, multi-threaded processors were developed,enabling a single hardware processor having a single multi-thread IPU toprovide a capability of simultaneously executing threads of differentprograms, thus each thread of a multi-threaded processor appeared to theoperating system as a processor. As technology further evolved, it waspossible to put multiple processors (each having an IPU) on a singlesemiconductor chip or die. These processors were referred to processorcores or just cores. Thus the terms such as processor, centralprocessing unit, processing unit, microprocessor, core, processor core,processor thread, and thread, for example, are often usedinterchangeably. Aspects of embodiments herein may be practiced by anyor all processors including those shown supra, without departing fromthe teachings herein. Wherein the term “thread” or “processor thread” isused herein, it is expected that particular advantage of the embodimentmay be had in a processor thread implementation.

Transaction Execution in Intel® Based Embodiments

In “Intel® Architecture Instruction Set Extensions ProgrammingReference” 319433-012A, February 2012, incorporated herein by referencein its entirety, Chapter 8 teaches, in part, that multithreadedapplications may take advantage of increasing numbers of CPU cores toachieve higher performance. However, the writing of multi-threadedapplications requires programmers to understand and take into accountdata sharing among the multiple threads. Access to shared data typicallyrequires synchronization mechanisms. These synchronization mechanismsare used to ensure that multiple threads update shared data byserializing operations that are applied to the shared data, oftenthrough the use of a critical section that is protected by a lock. Sinceserialization limits concurrency, programmers try to limit the overheaddue to synchronization.

Intel® Transactional Synchronization Extensions (Intel® TSX) allow aprocessor to dynamically determine whether threads need to be serializedthrough lock-protected critical sections, and to perform thatserialization only when required. This allows the processor to exposeand exploit concurrency that is hidden in an application because ofdynamically unnecessary synchronization.

With Intel TSX, programmer-specified code regions (also referred to as“transactional regions” or just “transactions”) are executedtransactionally. If the transactional execution completes successfully,then all memory operations performed within the transactional regionwill appear to have occurred instantaneously when viewed from otherprocessors. A processor makes the memory operations of the executedtransaction, performed within the transactional region, visible to otherprocessors only when a successful commit occurs, i.e., when thetransaction successfully completes execution. This process is oftenreferred to as an atomic commit.

Intel TSX provides two software interfaces to specify regions of codefor transactional execution. Hardware Lock Elision (HLE) is a legacycompatible instruction set extension (comprising the XACQUIRE andXRELEASE prefixes) to specify transactional regions. RestrictedTransactional Memory (RTM) is a new instruction set interface(comprising the XBEGIN, XEND, and XABORT instructions) for programmersto define transactional regions in a more flexible manner than thatpossible with HLE. HLE is for programmers who prefer the backwardcompatibility of the conventional mutual exclusion programming model andwould like to run HLE-enabled software on legacy hardware but would alsolike to take advantage of the new lock elision capabilities on hardwarewith HLE support. RTM is for programmers who prefer a flexible interfaceto the transactional execution hardware. In addition, Intel TSX alsoprovides an XTEST instruction. This instruction allows software to querywhether the logical processor is transactionally executing in atransactional region identified by either HLE or RTM.

Since a successful transactional execution ensures an atomic commit, theprocessor executes the code region optimistically without explicitsynchronization. If synchronization was unnecessary for that specificexecution, execution can commit without any cross-thread serialization.If the processor cannot commit atomically, then the optimistic executionfails. When this happens, the processor will roll back the execution, aprocess referred to as a transactional abort. On a transactional abort,the processor will discard all updates performed in the memory regionused by the transaction, restore architectural state to appear as if theoptimistic execution never occurred, and resume executionnon-transactionally.

A processor can perform a transactional abort for numerous reasons. Aprimary reason to abort a transaction is due to conflicting memoryaccesses between the transactionally executing logical processor andanother logical processor. Such conflicting memory accesses may preventa successful transactional execution. Memory addresses read from withina transactional region constitute the read-set of the transactionalregion and addresses written to within the transactional regionconstitute the write-set of the transactional region. Intel TSXmaintains the read- and write-sets at the granularity of a cache line. Aconflicting memory access occurs if another logical processor eitherreads a location that is part of the transactional region's write-set orwrites a location that is a part of either the read- or write-set of thetransactional region. A conflicting access typically means thatserialization is required for this code region. Since Intel TSX detectsdata conflicts at the granularity of a cache line, unrelated datalocations placed in the same cache line will be detected as conflictsthat result in transactional aborts. Transactional aborts may also occurdue to limited transactional resources. For example, the amount of dataaccessed in the region may exceed an implementation-specific capacity.Additionally, some instructions and system events may causetransactional aborts. Frequent transactional aborts result in wastedcycles and increased inefficiency.

Hardware Lock Elision

Hardware Lock Elision (HLE) provides a legacy compatible instruction setinterface for programmers to use transactional execution. HLE providestwo new instruction prefix hints: XACQUIRE and XRELEASE.

With HLE, a programmer adds the XACQUIRE prefix to the front of theinstruction that is used to acquire the lock that is protecting thecritical section. The processor treats the prefix as a hint to elide thewrite associated with the lock acquire operation. Even though the lockacquire has an associated write operation to the lock, the processordoes not add the address of the lock to the transactional region'swrite-set nor does it issue any write requests to the lock. Instead, theaddress of the lock is added to the read-set. The logical processorenters transactional execution. If the lock was available before theXACQUIRE prefixed instruction, then all other processors will continueto see the lock as available afterwards. Since the transactionallyexecuting logical processor neither added the address of the lock to itswrite-set nor performed externally visible write operations to the lock,other logical processors can read the lock without causing a dataconflict. This allows other logical processors to also enter andconcurrently execute the critical section protected by the lock. Theprocessor automatically detects any data conflicts that occur during thetransactional execution and will perform a transactional abort ifnecessary.

Even though the eliding processor did not perform any external writeoperations to the lock, the hardware ensures program order of operationson the lock. If the eliding processor itself reads the value of the lockin the critical section, it will appear as if the processor had acquiredthe lock, i.e. the read will return the non-elided value. This behaviorallows an HLE execution to be functionally equivalent to an executionwithout the HLE prefixes.

An XRELEASE prefix can be added in front of an instruction that is usedto release the lock protecting a critical section. Releasing the lockinvolves a write to the lock. If the instruction is to restore the valueof the lock to the value the lock had prior to the XACQUIRE prefixedlock acquire operation on the same lock, then the processor elides theexternal write request associated with the release of the lock and doesnot add the address of the lock to the write-set. The processor thenattempts to commit the transactional execution.

With HLE, if multiple threads execute critical sections protected by thesame lock but they do not perform any conflicting operations on eachother's data, then the threads can execute concurrently and withoutserialization. Even though the software uses lock acquisition operationson a common lock, the hardware recognizes this, elides the lock, andexecutes the critical sections on the two threads without requiring anycommunication through the lock—if such communication was dynamicallyunnecessary.

If the processor is unable to execute the region transactionally, thenthe processor will execute the region non-transactionally and withoutelision. HLE enabled software has the same forward progress guaranteesas the underlying non-HLE lock-based execution. For successful HLEexecution, the lock and the critical section code must follow certainguidelines. These guidelines only affect performance; and failure tofollow these guidelines will not result in a functional failure.Hardware without HLE support will ignore the XACQUIRE and XRELEASEprefix hints and will not perform any elision since these prefixescorrespond to the REPNE/REPE IA-32 prefixes which are ignored on theinstructions where XACQUIRE and XRELEASE are valid. Importantly, HLE iscompatible with the existing lock-based programming model. Improper useof hints will not cause functional bugs though it may expose latent bugsalready in the code.

Restricted Transactional Memory (RTM) provides a flexible softwareinterface for transactional execution. RTM provides three newinstructions—XBEGIN, XEND, and XABORT—for programmers to start, commit,and abort a transactional execution.

The programmer uses the XBEGIN instruction to specify the start of atransactional code region and the XEND instruction to specify the end ofthe transactional code region. If the RTM region could not besuccessfully executed transactionally, then the XBEGIN instruction takesan operand that provides a relative offset to the fallback instructionaddress.

A processor may abort RTM transactional execution for many reasons. Inmany instances, the hardware automatically detects transactional abortconditions and restarts execution from the fallback instruction addresswith the architectural state corresponding to that present at the startof the XBEGIN instruction and the EAX register updated to describe theabort status.

The XABORT instruction allows programmers to abort the execution of anRTM region explicitly. The XABORT instruction takes an 8-bit immediateargument that is loaded into the EAX register and will thus be availableto software following an RTM abort. RTM instructions do not have anydata memory location associated with them. While the hardware providesno guarantees as to whether an RTM region will ever successfully committransactionally, most transactions that follow the recommendedguidelines are expected to successfully commit transactionally. However,programmers must always provide an alternative code sequence in thefallback path to guarantee forward progress. This may be as simple asacquiring a lock and executing the specified code regionnon-transactionally. Further, a transaction that always aborts on agiven implementation may complete transactionally on a futureimplementation. Therefore, programmers must ensure the code paths forthe transactional region and the alternative code sequence arefunctionally tested.

Detection of HLE Support

A processor supports HLE execution if CPUID.07H.EBX.HLE [bit 4]=1.However, an application can use the HLE prefixes (XACQUIRE and XRELEASE)without checking whether the processor supports HLE. Processors withoutHLE support ignore these prefixes and will execute the code withoutentering transactional execution.

Detection of RTM Support

A processor supports RTM execution if CPUID.07H.EBX.RTM [bit 11]=1. Anapplication must check if the processor supports RTM before it uses theRTM instructions (XBEGIN, XEND, XABORT). These instructions willgenerate a #UD exception when used on a processor that does not supportRTM.

Detection of XTEST Instruction

A processor supports the XTEST instruction if it supports either HLE orRTM. An application must check either of these feature flags beforeusing the XTEST instruction. This instruction will generate a #UDexception when used on a processor that does not support either HLE orRTM.

Querying Transactional Execution Status

The XTEST instruction can be used to determine the transactional statusof a transactional region specified by HLE or RTM. Note, while the HLEprefixes are ignored on processors that do not support HLE, the XTESTinstruction will generate a #UD exception when used on processors thatdo not support either HLE or RTM.

Requirements for HLE Locks

For HLE execution to successfully commit transactionally, the lock mustsatisfy certain properties and access to the lock must follow certainguidelines.

An XRELEASE prefixed instruction must restore the value of the elidedlock to the value it had before the lock acquisition. This allowshardware to safely elide locks by not adding them to the write-set. Thedata size and data address of the lock release (XRELEASE prefixed)instruction must match that of the lock acquire (XACQUIRE prefixed) andthe lock must not cross a cache line boundary.

Software should not write to the elided lock inside a transactional HLEregion with any instruction other than an XRELEASE prefixed instruction,otherwise such a write may cause a transactional abort. In addition,recursive locks (where a thread acquires the same lock multiple timeswithout first releasing the lock) may also cause a transactional abort.Note that software can observe the result of the elided lock acquireinside the critical section. Such a read operation will return the valueof the write to the lock.

The processor automatically detects violations to these guidelines, andsafely transitions to a non-transactional execution without elision.Since Intel TSX detects conflicts at the granularity of a cache line,writes to data collocated on the same cache line as the elided lock maybe detected as data conflicts by other logical processors eliding thesame lock.

Transactional Nesting

Both HLE and RTM support nested transactional regions. However, atransactional abort restores state to the operation that startedtransactional execution: either the outermost XACQUIRE prefixed HLEeligible instruction or the outermost XBEGIN instruction. The processortreats all nested transactions as one transaction.

HLE Nesting and Elision

Programmers can nest HLE regions up to an implementation specific depthof MAX_HLE_NEST_COUNT. Each logical processor tracks the nesting countinternally but this count is not available to software. An XACQUIREprefixed HLE-eligible instruction increments the nesting count, and anXRELEASE prefixed HLE-eligible instruction decrements it. The logicalprocessor enters transactional execution when the nesting count goesfrom zero to one. The logical processor attempts to commit only when thenesting count becomes zero. A transactional abort may occur if thenesting count exceeds MAX_HLE_NEST_COUNT.

In addition to supporting nested HLE regions, the processor can alsoelide multiple nested locks. The processor tracks a lock for elisionbeginning with the XACQUIRE prefixed HLE eligible instruction for thatlock and ending with the XRELEASE prefixed HLE eligible instruction forthat same lock. The processor can, at any one time, track up to aMAX_HLE_ELIDED_LOCKS number of locks. For example, if the implementationsupports a MAX_HLE_ELIDED_LOCKS value of two and if the programmer neststhree HLE identified critical sections (by performing XACQUIRE prefixedHLE eligible instructions on three distinct locks without performing anintervening XRELEASE prefixed HLE eligible instruction on any one of thelocks), then the first two locks will be elided, but the third won't beelided (but will be added to the transaction's writeset). However, theexecution will still continue transactionally. Once an XRELEASE for oneof the two elided locks is encountered, a subsequent lock acquiredthrough the XACQUIRE prefixed HLE eligible instruction will be elided.

The processor attempts to commit the HLE execution when all elidedXACQUIRE and XRELEASE pairs have been matched, the nesting count goes tozero, and the locks have satisfied requirements. If execution cannotcommit atomically, then execution transitions to a non-transactionalexecution without elision as if the first instruction did not have anXACQUIRE prefix.

RTM Nesting

Programmers can nest RTM regions up to an implementation specificMAX_RTM_NEST_COUNT. The logical processor tracks the nesting countinternally but this count is not available to software. An XBEGINinstruction increments the nesting count, and an XEND instructiondecrements the nesting count. The logical processor attempts to commitonly if the nesting count becomes zero. A transactional abort occurs ifthe nesting count exceeds MAX_RTM_NEST_COUNT.

Nesting HLE and RTM

HLE and RTM provide two alternative software interfaces to a commontransactional execution capability. Transactional processing behavior isimplementation specific when HLE and RTM are nested together, e.g., HLEis inside RTM or RTM is inside HLE. However, in all cases, theimplementation will maintain HLE and RTM semantics. An implementationmay choose to ignore HLE hints when used inside RTM regions, and maycause a transactional abort when RTM instructions are used inside HLEregions. In the latter case, the transition from transactional tonon-transactional execution occurs seamlessly since the processor willre-execute the HLE region without actually doing elision, and thenexecute the RTM instructions.

Abort Status Definition

RTM uses the EAX register to communicate abort status to software.Following an RTM abort the EAX register has the following definition.

TABLE 1 RTM Abort Status Definition EAX Register Bit Position Meaning 0Set if abort caused by XABORT instruction 1 If set, the transaction maysucceed on retry, this bit is always clear if bit 0 is set 2 Set ifanother logical processor conflicted with a memory address that was partof the transaction that aborted 3 Set if an internal buffer overflowed 4Set if a debug breakpoint was hit 5 Set if an abort occurred duringexecution of a nested transaction 23:6 Reserved 31-24 XABORT argument(only valid if bit 0 set, otherwise reserved)

The EAX abort status for RTM only provides causes for aborts. It doesnot by itself encode whether an abort or commit occurred for the RTMregion. The value of EAX can be 0 following an RTM abort. For example, aCPUID instruction when used inside an RTM region causes a transactionalabort and may not satisfy the requirements for setting any of the EAXbits. This may result in an EAX value of 0.

RTM Memory Ordering

A successful RTM commit causes all memory operations in the RTM regionto appear to execute atomically. A successfully committed RTM regionconsisting of an XBEGIN followed by an XEND, even with no memoryoperations in the RTM region, has the same ordering semantics as a LOCKprefixed instruction.

The XBEGIN instruction does not have fencing semantics. However, if anRTM execution aborts, then all memory updates from within the RTM regionare discarded and are not made visible to any other logical processor.

RTM-Enabled Debugger Support

By default, any debug exception inside an RTM region will cause atransactional abort and will redirect control flow to the fallbackinstruction address with architectural state recovered and bit 4 in EAXset. However, to allow software debuggers to intercept execution ondebug exceptions, the RTM architecture provides additional capability.

If bit 11 of DR7 and bit 15 of the IA32_DEBUGCTL_MSR are both 1, any RTMabort due to a debug exception (#DB) or breakpoint exception (#BP)causes execution to roll back and restart from the XBEGIN instructioninstead of the fallback address. In this scenario, the EAX register willalso be restored back to the point of the XBEGIN instruction.

Programming Considerations

Typical programmer-identified regions are expected to transactionallyexecute and commit successfully. However, Intel TSX does not provide anysuch guarantee. A transactional execution may abort for many reasons. Totake full advantage of the transactional capabilities, programmersshould follow certain guidelines to increase the probability of theirtransactional execution committing successfully.

This section discusses various events that may cause transactionalaborts. The architecture ensures that updates performed within atransaction that subsequently aborts execution will never becomevisible. Only committed transactional executions initiate an update tothe architectural state. Transactional aborts never cause functionalfailures and only affect performance.

Instruction Based Considerations

Programmers can use any instruction safely inside a transaction (HLE orRTM) and can use transactions at any privilege level. However, someinstructions will always abort the transactional execution and causeexecution to seamlessly and safely transition to a non-transactionalpath.

Intel TSX allows for most common instructions to be used insidetransactions without causing aborts. The following operations inside atransaction do not typically cause an abort:

-   -   Operations on the instruction pointer register, general purpose        registers (GPRs) and the status flags (CF, OF, SF, PF, AF, and        ZF); and    -   Operations on XMM and YMM registers and the MXCSR register.

However, programmers must be careful when intermixing SSE and AVXoperations inside a transactional region. Intermixing SSE instructionsaccessing XMM registers and AVX instructions accessing YMM registers maycause transactions to abort. Programmers may use REP/REPNE prefixedstring operations inside transactions. However, long strings may causeaborts. Further, the use of CLD and STD instructions may cause aborts ifthey change the value of the DF flag. However, if DF is 1, the STDinstruction will not cause an abort. Similarly, if DF is 0, then the CLDinstruction will not cause an abort.

Instructions not enumerated here as causing abort when used inside atransaction will typically not cause a transaction to abort (examplesinclude but are not limited to MFENCE, LFENCE, SFENCE, RDTSC, RDTSCP,etc.).

The following instructions will abort transactional execution on anyimplementation:

-   -   XABORT    -   CPUID    -   PAUSE

In addition, in some implementations, the following instructions mayalways cause transactional aborts. These instructions are not expectedto be commonly used inside typical transactional regions. However,programmers must not rely on these instructions to force a transactionalabort, since whether they cause transactional aborts is implementationdependent.

-   -   Operations on X87 and MMX architecture state. This includes all        MMX and X87 instructions, including the FXRSTOR and FXSAVE        instructions.    -   Update to non-status portion of EFLAGS: CLI, STI, POPFD, POPFQ,        CLTS.    -   Instructions that update segment registers, debug registers        and/or control registers:    -   MOV to DS/ES/FS/GS/SS, POP DS/ES/FS/GS/SS, LDS, LES, LFS, LGS,        LSS, SWAPGS, WRFSBASE, WRGSBASE, LGDT, SGDT, LIDT, SIDT, LLDT,        SLDT, LTR, STR, Far CALL, Far JMP, Far RET, IRET, MOV to DRx,        MOV to CR0/CR2/CR3/CR4/CR8 and LMSW.    -   Ring transitions: SYSENTER, SYSCALL, SYSEXIT, and SYSRET.    -   TLB and Cacheability control: CLFLUSH, INVD, WBINVD, INVLPG,        INVPCID, and memory instructions with a non-temporal hint        (MOVNTDQA, MOVNTDQ, MOVNTI, MOVNTPD, MOVNTPS, and MOVNTQ).    -   Processor state save: XSAVE, XSAVEOPT, and XRSTOR.    -   Interrupts: INTn, INTO.    -   IO: IN, INS, REP INS, OUT, OUTS, REP OUTS and their variants.    -   VMX: VMPTRLD, VMPTRST, VMCLEAR, VMREAD, VMWRITE, VMCALL,        VMLAUNCH, VMRESUME, VMXOFF, VMXON, INVEPT, and INVVPID.    -   SMX: GETSEC.    -   UD2, RSM, RDMSR, WRMSR, HLT, MONITOR, MWAIT, XSETBV, VZEROUPPER,        MASKMOVQ, and V/MASKMOVDQU.        Runtime Considerations

In addition to the instruction-based considerations, runtime events maycause transactional execution to abort. These may be due to data accesspatterns or micro-architectural implementation features. The followinglist is not a comprehensive discussion of all abort causes.

Any fault or trap in a transaction that must be exposed to software willbe suppressed. Transactional execution will abort and execution willtransition to a non-transactional execution, as if the fault or trap hadnever occurred. If an exception is not masked, then that un-maskedexception will result in a transactional abort and the state will appearas if the exception had never occurred.

Synchronous exception events (#DE, #OF, #NP, #SS, #GP, #BR, #UD, #AC,#XF, #PF, #NM, #TS, #MF, #DB, #BP/INT3) that occur during transactionalexecution may cause an execution not to commit transactionally, andrequire a non-transactional execution. These events are suppressed as ifthey had never occurred. With HLE, since the non-transactional code pathis identical to the transactional code path, these events will typicallyre-appear when the instruction that caused the exception is re-executednon-transactionally, causing the associated synchronous events to bedelivered appropriately in the non-transactional execution. Asynchronousevents (NMI, SMI, INTR, IPI, PMI, etc.) occurring during transactionalexecution may cause the transactional execution to abort and transitionto a non-transactional execution. The asynchronous events will be pendedand handled after the transactional abort is processed.

Transactions only support write-back cacheable memory type operations. Atransaction may always abort if the transaction includes operations onany other memory type. This includes instruction fetches to UC memorytype.

Memory accesses within a transactional region may require the processorto set the Accessed and Dirty flags of the referenced page table entry.The behavior of how the processor handles this is implementationspecific. Some implementations may allow the updates to these flags tobecome externally visible even if the transactional region subsequentlyaborts. Some Intel TSX implementations may choose to abort thetransactional execution if these flags need to be updated. Further, aprocessor's page-table walk may generate accesses to its owntransactionally written but uncommitted state. Some Intel TSXimplementations may choose to abort the execution of a transactionalregion in such situations. Regardless, the architecture ensures that, ifthe transactional region aborts, then the transactionally written statewill not be made architecturally visible through the behavior ofstructures such as TLBs.

Executing self-modifying code transactionally may also causetransactional aborts. Programmers must continue to follow the Intelrecommended guidelines for writing self-modifying and cross-modifyingcode even when employing HLE and RTM. While an implementation of RTM andHLE will typically provide sufficient resources for executing commontransactional regions, implementation constraints and excessive sizesfor transactional regions may cause a transactional execution to abortand transition to a non-transactional execution. The architectureprovides no guarantee of the amount of resources available to dotransactional execution and does not guarantee that a transactionalexecution will ever succeed.

Conflicting requests to a cache line accessed within a transactionalregion may prevent the transaction from executing successfully. Forexample, if logical processor P0 reads line A in a transactional regionand another logical processor P1 writes line A (either inside or outsidea transactional region) then logical processor P0 may abort if logicalprocessor P1's write interferes with processor P0's ability to executetransactionally.

Similarly, if P0 writes line A in a transactional region and P1 reads orwrites line A (either inside or outside a transactional region), then P0may abort if P1's access to line A interferes with P0's ability toexecute transactionally. In addition, other coherence traffic may attimes appear as conflicting requests and may cause aborts. While thesefalse conflicts may happen, they are expected to be uncommon. Theconflict resolution policy to determine whether P0 or P1 aborts in theabove scenarios is implementation specific.

Generic Transaction Execution embodiments:

According to “ARCHITECTURES FOR TRANSACTIONAL MEMORY”, a dissertationsubmitted to the Department of Computer Science and the Committee onGraduate Studies of Stanford University in partial fulfillment of therequirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy, by Austen McDonald,June 2009, incorporated by reference herein in its entirety,fundamentally, there are three mechanisms needed to implement an atomicand isolated transactional region: versioning, conflict detection, andcontention management.

To make a transactional code region appear atomic, all the modificationsperformed by that transactional code region must be stored and keptisolated from other transactions until commit time. The system does thisby implementing a versioning policy. Two versioning paradigms exist:eager and lazy. An eager versioning system stores newly generatedtransactional values in place and stores previous memory values on theside, in what is called an undo-log. A lazy versioning system stores newvalues temporarily in what is called a write buffer, copying them tomemory only on commit. In either system, the cache is used to optimizestorage of new versions.

To ensure that transactions appear to be performed atomically, conflictsmust be detected and resolved. The two systems, i.e., the eager and lazyversioning systems, detect conflicts by implementing a conflictdetection policy, either optimistic or pessimistic. An optimistic systemexecutes transactions in parallel, checking for conflicts only when atransaction commits. A pessimistic system checks for conflicts at eachload and store. Similar to versioning, conflict detection also uses thecache, marking each line as either part of the read-set, part of thewrite-set, or both. The two systems resolve conflicts by implementing acontention management policy. Many contention management policies exist,some are more appropriate for optimistic conflict detection and some aremore appropriate for pessimistic. Described below are some examplepolicies.

Since each transactional memory (TM) system needs both versioningdetection and conflict detection, these options give rise to fourdistinct TM designs: Eager-Pessimistic (EP), Eager-Optimistic (EO),Lazy-Pessimistic (LP), and Lazy-Optimistic (LO). Table 2 brieflydescribes all four distinct TM designs.

FIGS. 1 and 2 depict an example of a multicore TM environment. FIG. 1shows many TM-enabled CPUs (CPU1 114 a, CPU2 114 b, etc.) on one die100, connected with an interconnect 122, under management of aninterconnect control 120 a, 120 b. Each CPU 114 a, 114 b (also known asa Processor) may have a split cache consisting of an Instruction Cache116 a, 116 b for caching instructions from memory to be executed and aData Cache 118 a, 118 b with TM support for caching data (operands) ofmemory locations to be operated on by CPU 114 a, 114 b (in FIG. 1, eachCPU 114 a, 114 b and its associated caches are referenced as 112 a, 112b). In an implementation, caches of multiple dies 100 are interconnectedto support cache coherency between the caches of the multiple dies 100.In an implementation, a single cache, rather than the split cache isemployed holding both instructions and data. In implementations, the CPUcaches are one level of caching in a hierarchical cache structure. Forexample each die 100 may employ a shared cache 124 to be shared amongstall the CPUs on the die 100. In another implementation, each die mayhave access to a shared cache 124, shared amongst all the processors ofall the dies 100.

FIG. 2 shows the details of an example transactional CPU environment112, having a CPU 114, including additions to support TM. Thetransactional CPU (processor) 114 may include hardware for supportingRegister Checkpoints 126 and special TM Registers 128. The transactionalCPU cache may have the MESI bits 130, Tags 140 and Data 142 of aconventional cache but also, for example, R bits 132 showing a line hasbeen read by the CPU 114 while executing a transaction and W bits 138showing a line has been written-to by the CPU 114 while executing atransaction.

A key detail for programmers in any TM system is how non-transactionalaccesses interact with transactions. By design, transactional accessesare screened from each other using the mechanisms above. However, theinteraction between a regular, non-transactional load with a transactioncontaining a new value for that address must still be considered. Inaddition, the interaction between a non-transactional store with atransaction that has read that address must also be explored. These areissues of the database concept isolation.

A TM system is said to implement strong isolation, sometimes calledstrong atomicity, when every non-transactional load and store acts likean atomic transaction. Therefore, non-transactional loads cannot seeuncommitted data and non-transactional stores cause atomicity violationsin any transactions that have read that address. A system where this isnot the case is said to implement weak isolation, sometimes called weakatomicity.

Strong isolation is often more desirable than weak isolation due to therelative ease of conceptualization and implementation of strongisolation. Additionally, if a programmer has forgotten to surround someshared memory references with transactions, causing bugs, then withstrong isolation, the programmer will often detect that oversight usinga simple debug interface because the programmer will see anon-transactional region causing atomicity violations. Also, programswritten in one model may work differently on another model.

Further, strong isolation is often easier to support in hardware TM thanweak isolation. With strong isolation, since the coherence protocolalready manages load and store communication between processors,transactions can detect non-transactional loads and stores and actappropriately. To implement strong isolation in software TransactionalMemory (TM), non-transactional code must be modified to include read-and write-barriers; potentially crippling performance. Although greateffort has been expended to remove many un-needed barriers, suchtechniques are often complex and performance is typically far lower thanthat of HTMs.

TABLE 2 Transactional Memory Design Space VERSIONING Lazy Eager CONFLICTOptimistic Storing updates in a write Not practical: waiting to updateDETECTION buffer; detecting conflicts at memory until commit time butcommit time. detecting conflicts at access time guarantees wasted workand provides no advantage Pessimistic Storing updates in a Updatingmemory, keeping old writebuffer; detecting values in undo log; detectingconflicts at access time. conflicts at access time.

Table 2 illustrates the fundamental design space of transactional memory(versioning and conflict detection).

Eager-Pessimistic (EP)

This first TM design described below is known as Eager-Pessimistic. AnEP system stores its write-set “in place” (hence the name “eager”) and,to support rollback, stores the old values of overwritten lines in an“undo log”. Processors use the W 138 and R 132 cache bits to track readand write-sets and detect conflicts when receiving snooped loadrequests. Perhaps the most notable examples of EP systems in knownliterature are LogTM and UTM.

Beginning a transaction in an EP system is much like beginning atransaction in other systems: tm_begin( ) takes a register checkpoint,and initializes any status registers. An EP system also requiresinitializing the undo log, the details of which are dependent on the logformat, but often involve initializing a log base pointer to a region ofpre-allocated, thread-private memory, and clearing a log boundsregister.

Versioning: In EP, due to the way eager versioning is designed tofunction, the MESI 130 state transitions (cache line indicatorscorresponding to Modified, Exclusive, Shared, and Invalid code states)are left mostly unchanged. Outside of a transaction, the MESI 130 statetransitions are left completely unchanged. When reading a line inside atransaction, the standard coherence transitions apply (S (Shared)→S, I(Invalid)→S, or I→E (Exclusive)), issuing a load miss as needed, but theR 132 bit is also set. Likewise, writing a line applies the standardtransitions (S→M, E→I, I→M), issuing a miss as needed, but also sets theW 138 (Written) bit. The first time a line is written, the old versionof the entire line is loaded then written to the undo log to preserve itin case the current transaction aborts. The newly written data is thenstored “in-place,” over the old data.

Conflict Detection: Pessimistic conflict detection uses coherencemessages exchanged on misses, or upgrades, to look for conflicts betweentransactions. When a read miss occurs within a transaction, otherprocessors receive a load request; but they ignore the request if theydo not have the needed line. If the other processors have the neededline non-speculatively or have the line R 132 (Read), they downgradethat line to S, and in certain cases issue a cache-to-cache transfer ifthey have the line in MESI's 130 M or E state. However, if the cache hasthe line W 138, then a conflict is detected between the two transactionsand additional action(s) must be taken.

Similarly, when a transaction seeks to upgrade a line from shared tomodified (on a first write), the transaction issues an exclusive loadrequest, which is also used to detect conflicts. If a receiving cachehas the line non-speculatively, then the line is invalidated, and incertain cases a cache-to-cache transfer (M or E states) is issued. But,if the line is R 132 or W 138, a conflict is detected.

Validation: Because conflict detection is performed on every load, atransaction always has exclusive access to its own write-set. Therefore,validation does not require any additional work.

Commit: Since eager versioning stores the new version of data items inplace, the commit process simply clears the W 138 and R 132 bits anddiscards the undo log.

Abort: When a transaction rolls back, the original version of each cacheline in the undo log must be restored, a process called “unrolling” or“applying” the log. This is done during tm_discard( ) and must be atomicwith regard to other transactions. Specifically, the write-set muststill be used to detect conflicts: this transaction has the only correctversion of lines in its undo log, and requesting transactions must waitfor the correct version to be restored from that log. Such a log can beapplied using a hardware state machine or software abort handler.

Eager-Pessimistic has the characteristics of: Commit is simple and sinceit is in-place, very fast. Similarly, validation is a no-op. Pessimisticconflict detection detects conflicts early, thereby reducing the numberof “doomed” transactions. For example, if two transactions are involvedin a Write-After-Read dependency, then that dependency is detectedimmediately in pessimistic conflict detection. However, in optimisticconflict detection such conflicts are not detected until the writercommits.

Eager-Pessimistic also has the characteristics of: As described above,the first time a cache line is written, the old value must be written tothe log, incurring extra cache accesses. Aborts are expensive as theyrequire undoing the log. For each cache line in the log, a load must beissued, perhaps going as far as main memory before continuing to thenext line. Pessimistic conflict detection also prevents certainserializable schedules from existing.

Additionally, because conflicts are handled as they occur, there is apotential for livelock and careful contention management mechanisms mustbe employed to guarantee forward progress.

Lazy-Optimistic (LO)

Another popular TM design is Lazy-Optimistic (LO), which stores itswrite-set in a “write buffer” or “redo log” and detects conflicts atcommit time (still using the R 132 and W 138 bits).

Versioning: Just as in the EP system, the MESI protocol of the LO designis enforced outside of the transactions. Once inside a transaction,reading a line incurs the standard MESI transitions but also sets the R132 bit. Likewise, writing a line sets the W 138 bit of the line, buthandling the MESI transitions of the LO design is different from that ofthe EP design. First, with lazy versioning, the new versions of writtendata are stored in the cache hierarchy until commit while othertransactions have access to old versions available in memory or othercaches. To make available the old versions, dirty lines (M lines) mustbe evicted when first written by a transaction. Second, no upgrademisses are needed because of the optimistic conflict detection feature:if a transaction has a line in the S state, it can simply write to itand upgrade that line to an M state without communicating the changeswith other transactions because conflict detection is done at committime.

Conflict Detection and Validation: To validate a transaction and detectconflicts, LO communicates the addresses of speculatively modified linesto other transactions only when it is preparing to commit. Onvalidation, the processor sends one, potentially large, network packetcontaining all the addresses in the write-set. Data is not sent, butleft in the cache of the committer and marked dirty (M). To build thispacket without searching the cache for lines marked W, a simple bitvector is used, called a “store buffer,” with one bit per cache line totrack these speculatively modified lines. Other transactions use thisaddress packet to detect conflicts: if an address is found in the cacheand the R 132 and/or W 138 bits are set, then a conflict is initiated.If the line is found but neither R 132 nor W 138 is set, then the lineis simply invalidated, which is similar to processing an exclusive load.

To support transaction atomicity, these address packets must be handledatomically, i.e., no two address packets may exist at once with the sameaddresses. In an LO system, this can be achieved by simply acquiring aglobal commit token before sending the address packet. However, atwo-phase commit scheme could be employed by first sending out theaddress packet, collecting responses, enforcing an ordering protocol(perhaps oldest transaction first), and committing once all responsesare satisfactory.

Commit: Once validation has occurred, commit needs no special treatment:simply clear W 138 and R 132 bits and the store buffer. Thetransaction's writes are already marked dirty in the cache and othercaches' copies of these lines have been invalidated via the addresspacket. Other processors can then access the committed data through theregular coherence protocol.

Abort: Rollback is equally easy: because the write-set is containedwithin the local caches, these lines can be invalidated, then clear W138 and R 132 bits and the store buffer. The store buffer allows W linesto be found to invalidate without the need to search the cache.

Lazy-Optimistic has the characteristics of: Aborts are very fast,requiring no additional loads or stores and making only local changes.More serializable schedules can exist than found in EP, which allows anLO system to more aggressively speculate that transactions areindependent, which can yield higher performance. Finally, the latedetection of conflicts can increase the likelihood of forward progress.

Lazy-Optimistic also has the characteristics of: Validation takes globalcommunication time proportional to size of write set. Doomedtransactions can waste work since conflicts are detected only at committime.

Lazy-Pessimistic (LP)

Lazy-Pessimistic (LP) represents a third TM design option, sittingsomewhere between EP and LO: storing newly written lines in a writebuffer but detecting conflicts on a per access basis.

Versioning: Versioning is similar but not identical to that of LO:reading a line sets its R bit 132, writing a line sets its W bit 138,and a store buffer is used to track W lines in the cache. Also, dirty(M) lines must be evicted when first written by a transaction, just asin LO. However, since conflict detection is pessimistic, load exclusivesmust be performed when upgrading a transactional line from I, S→M, whichis unlike LO.

Conflict Detection: LP's conflict detection operates the same as EP's:using coherence messages to look for conflicts between transactions.

Validation: Like in EP, pessimistic conflict detection ensures that atany point, a running transaction has no conflicts with any other runningtransaction, so validation is a no-op.

Commit: Commit needs no special treatment: simply clear W 138 and R 132bits and the store buffer, like in LO.

Abort: Rollback is also like that of LO: simply invalidate the write-setusing the store buffer and clear the W and R bits and the store buffer.

Eager-Optimistic (EO)

The LP has the characteristics of: Like LO, aborts are very fast. LikeEP, the use of pessimistic conflict detection reduces the number of“doomed” transactions. Like EP, some serializable schedules are notallowed and conflict detection must be performed on each cache miss.

The final combination of versioning and conflict detection isEager-Optimistic (EO). EO may be a less than optimal choice for HTMsystems: since new transactional versions are written in-place, othertransactions have no choice but to notice conflicts as they occur (i.e.,as cache misses occur). But since EO waits until commit time to detectconflicts, those transactions become “zombies,” continuing to execute,wasting resources, yet are “doomed” to abort.

EO has proven to be useful in STMs and is implemented by Bartok-STM andMcRT. A lazy versioning STM needs to check its write buffer on each readto ensure that it is reading the most recent value. Since the writebuffer is not a hardware structure, this is expensive, hence thepreference for write-in-place eager versioning. Additionally, sincechecking for conflicts is also expensive in an STM, optimistic conflictdetection offers the advantage of performing this operation in bulk.

Contention Management

How a transaction rolls back once the system has decided to abort thattransaction has been described above, but, since a conflict involves twotransactions, the topics of which transaction should abort, how thatabort should be initiated, and when should the aborted transaction beretried need to be explored. These are topics that are addressed byContention Management (CM), a key component of transactional memory.Described below are policies regarding how the systems initiate abortsand the various established methods of managing which transactionsshould abort in a conflict.

Contention Management Policies

A Contention Management (CM) Policy is a mechanism that determines whichtransaction involved in a conflict should abort and when the abortedtransaction should be retried. For example, it is often the case thatretrying an aborted transaction immediately does not lead to the bestperformance. Conversely, employing a back-off mechanism, which delaysthe retrying of an aborted transaction, can yield better performance.STMs first grappled with finding the best contention management policiesand many of the policies outlined below were originally developed forSTMs.

CM Policies draw on a number of measures to make decisions, includingages of the transactions, size of read- and write-sets, the number ofprevious aborts, etc. The combinations of measures to make suchdecisions are endless, but certain combinations are described below,roughly in order of increasing complexity.

To establish some nomenclature, first note that in a conflict there aretwo sides: the attacker and the defender. The attacker is thetransaction requesting access to a shared memory location. Inpessimistic conflict detection, the attacker is the transaction issuingthe load or load exclusive. In optimistic, the attacker is thetransaction attempting to validate. The defender in both cases is thetransaction receiving the attacker's request.

An Aggressive CM Policy immediately and always retries either theattacker or the defender. In LO, Aggressive means that the attackeralways wins, and so Aggressive is sometimes called committer wins. Sucha policy was used for the earliest LO systems. In the case of EP,Aggressive can be either defender wins or attacker wins.

Restarting a conflicting transaction that will immediately experienceanother conflict is bound to waste work—namely interconnect bandwidthrefilling cache misses. A Polite CM Policy employs exponential backoff(but linear could also be used) before restarting conflicts. To preventstarvation, a situation where a process does not have resourcesallocated to it by the scheduler, the exponential backoff greatlyincreases the odds of transaction success after some n retries.

Another approach to conflict resolution is to randomly abort theattacker or defender (a policy called Randomized). Such a policy may becombined with a randomized backoff scheme to avoid unneeded contention.

However, making random choices, when selecting a transaction to abort,can result in aborting transactions that have completed “a lot of work”,which can waste resources. To avoid such waste, the amount of workcompleted on the transaction can be taken into account when determiningwhich transaction to abort. One measure of work could be a transaction'sage. Other methods include Oldest, Bulk TM, Size Matters, Karma, andPolka. Oldest is a simple timestamp method that aborts the youngertransaction in a conflict. Bulk TM uses this scheme. Size Matters islike Oldest but instead of transaction age, the number of read/writtenwords is used as the priority, reverting to Oldest after a fixed numberof aborts. Karma is similar, using the size of the write-set aspriority. Rollback then proceeds after backing off a fixed amount oftime. Aborted transactions keep their priorities after being aborted(hence the name Karma). Polka works like Karma but instead of backingoff a predefined amount of time, it backs off exponentially more eachtime.

Since aborting wastes work, it is logical to argue that stalling anattacker until the defender has finished their transaction would lead tobetter performance. Unfortunately, such a simple scheme easily leads todeadlock.

Deadlock avoidance techniques can be used to solve this problem. Greedyuses two rules to avoid deadlock. The first rule is, if a firsttransaction, T1, has lower priority than a second transaction, T0, or ifT1 is waiting for another transaction, then T1 aborts when conflictingwith T0. The second rule is, if T1 has higher priority than T0 and isnot waiting, then T0 waits until T1 commits, aborts, or starts waiting(in which case the first rule is applied). Greedy provides someguarantees about time bounds for executing a set of transactions. One EPdesign (LogTM) uses a CM policy similar to Greedy to achieve stallingwith conservative deadlock avoidance.

Example MESI coherency rules provide for four possible states in which acache line of a multiprocessor cache system may reside, M, E, S, and I,defined as follows:

Modified (M): The cache line is present only in the current cache, andis dirty; it has been modified from the value in main memory. The cacheis required to write the data back to main memory at some time in thefuture, before permitting any other read of the (no longer valid) mainmemory state. The write-back changes the line to the Exclusive state.

Exclusive (E): The cache line is present only in the current cache, butis clean; it matches main memory. It may be changed to the Shared stateat any time, in response to a read request. Alternatively, it may bechanged to the Modified state when writing to it.

Shared (S): Indicates that this cache line may be stored in other cachesof the machine and is “clean”; it matches the main memory. The line maybe discarded (changed to the Invalid state) at any time.

Invalid (I): Indicates that this cache line is invalid (unused).

TM coherency status indicators (R 132, W 138) may be provided for eachcache line, in addition to, or encoded in the MESI coherency bits. An R132 indicator indicates the current transaction has read from the dataof the cache line, and a W 138 indicator indicates the currenttransaction has written to the data of the cache line.

In another aspect of TM design, a system is designed using transactionalstore buffers. U.S. Pat. No. 6,349,361 titled “Methods and Apparatus forReordering and Renaming Memory References in a Multiprocessor ComputerSystem,” filed Mar. 31, 2000 and incorporated by reference herein in itsentirety, teaches a method for reordering and renaming memory referencesin a multiprocessor computer system having at least a first and a secondprocessor. The first processor has a first private cache and a firstbuffer, and the second processor has a second private cache and a secondbuffer. The method includes the steps of, for each of a plurality ofgated store requests received by the first processor to store a datum,exclusively acquiring a cache line that contains the datum by the firstprivate cache, and storing the datum in the first buffer. Upon the firstbuffer receiving a load request from the first processor to load aparticular datum, the particular datum is provided to the firstprocessor from among the data stored in the first buffer based on anin-order sequence of load and store operations. Upon the first cachereceiving a load request from the second cache for a given datum, anerror condition is indicated and a current state of at least one of theprocessors is reset to an earlier state when the load request for thegiven datum corresponds to the data stored in the first buffer.

The main implementation components of one such transactional memoryfacility are a transaction-backup register file for holdingpre-transaction GR (general register) content, a cache directory totrack the cache lines accessed during the transaction, a store cache tobuffer stores until the transaction ends, and firmware routines toperform various complex functions. In this section a detailedimplementation is described.

IBM zEnterprise EC12 Enterprise Server Embodiment

The IBM zEnterprise EC12 enterprise server introduces transactionalexecution (TX) in transactional memory, and is described in part in apaper, “Transactional Memory Architecture and Implementation for IBMSystem z” of Proceedings Pages 25-36 presented at MICRO-45, 1-5 Dec.2012, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, available from IEEE ComputerSociety Conference Publishing Services (CPS), which is incorporated byreference herein in its entirety.

Table 3 shows an example transaction. Transactions started with TBEGINare not assured to ever successfully complete with TEND, since they canexperience an aborting condition at every attempted execution, e.g., dueto repeating conflicts with other CPUs. This requires that the programsupport a fallback path to perform the same operationnon-transactionally, e.g., by using traditional locking schemes. Thisputs significant burden on the programming and software verificationteams, especially where the fallback path is not automatically generatedby a reliable compiler.

TABLE 3 Example Transaction Code LHI R0,0 *initialize retry count=0 loopTBEGIN *begin transaction JNZ abort *go to abort code if CC1=0 LT R1,lock *load and test the fallback lock JNZ lckbzy *branch if lock busy .. . perform operation . . . TEND *end transaction . . .  . . .  . . .  .. . lckbzy TABORT *abort if lock busy; this *resumes after TBEGIN abortJO fallback *no retry if CC=3 AHI R0, 1 *increment retry count CIJNLR0,6, fallback *give up after 6 attempts PPA R0, TX *random delay basedon retry count . . . potentially wait for lock to become free . . . Jloop *jump back to retryfallback OBTAIN lock *using Compare&Swap . . .perform operation . . . RELEASE lock . . .  . . .  . . .  . . .

The requirement of providing a fallback path for aborted TransactionExecution (TX) transactions can be onerous. Many transactions operatingon shared data structures are expected to be short, touch only a fewdistinct memory locations, and use simple instructions only. For thosetransactions, the IBM zEnterprise EC12 introduces the concept ofconstrained transactions; under normal conditions, the CPU 114 (FIG. 2)assures that constrained transactions eventually end successfully,albeit without giving a strict limit on the number of necessary retries.A constrained transaction starts with a TBEGINC instruction and endswith a regular TEND. Implementing a task as a constrained ornon-constrained transaction typically results in very comparableperformance, but constrained transactions simplify software developmentby removing the need for a fallback path. IBM's Transactional Executionarchitecture is further described in z/Architecture, Principles ofOperation, Tenth Edition, SA22-7832-09 published September 2012 fromIBM, incorporated by reference herein in its entirety.

A constrained transaction starts with the TBEGINC instruction. Atransaction initiated with TBEGINC must follow a list of programmingconstraints; otherwise the program takes a non-filterableconstraint-violation interruption. Exemplary constraints may include,but not be limited to: the transaction can execute a maximum of 32instructions, all instruction text must be within 256 consecutive bytesof memory; the transaction contains only forward-pointing relativebranches (i.e., no loops or subroutine calls); the transaction canaccess a maximum of 4 aligned octowords (an octoword is 32 bytes) ofmemory; and restriction of the instruction-set to exclude complexinstructions like decimal or floating-point operations. The constraintsare chosen such that many common operations like doubly linkedlist-insert/delete operations can be performed, including the verypowerful concept of atomic compare-and-swap targeting up to 4 alignedoctowords. At the same time, the constraints were chosen conservativelysuch that future CPU implementations can assure transaction successwithout needing to adjust the constraints, since that would otherwiselead to software incompatibility.

TBEGINC mostly behaves like XBEGIN in TSX or TBEGIN on IBM's zEC12servers, except that the floating-point register (FPR) control and theprogram interruption filtering fields do not exist and the controls areconsidered to be zero. On a transaction abort, the instruction addressis set back directly to the TBEGINC instead of to the instruction after,reflecting the immediate retry and absence of an abort path forconstrained transactions.

Nested transactions are not allowed within constrained transactions, butif a TBEGINC occurs within a non-constrained transaction it is treatedas opening a new non-constrained nesting level just like TBEGIN would.This can occur, e.g., if a non-constrained transaction calls asubroutine that uses a constrained transaction internally. Sinceinterruption filtering is implicitly off, all exceptions during aconstrained transaction lead to an interruption into the operatingsystem (OS). Eventual successful finishing of the transaction relies onthe capability of the OS to page-in the at most 4 pages touched by anyconstrained transaction. The OS must also ensure time-slices long enoughto allow the transaction to complete.

TABLE 4 Transaction Code Example TBEGINC *begin constrained transaction. . . perform operation . . . TEND *end transaction

Table 4 shows the constrained-transactional implementation of the codein Table 3, assuming that the constrained transactions do not interactwith other locking-based code. No lock testing is shown therefore, butcould be added if constrained transactions and lock-based code weremixed.

When failure occurs repeatedly, software emulation is performed usingmillicode as part of system firmware. Advantageously, constrainedtransactions have desirable properties because of the burden removedfrom programmers.

With reference to FIG. 3, the IBM zEnterprise EC12 processor introducedthe transactional execution facility. The processor can decode 3instructions per clock cycle; simple instructions are dispatched assingle micro-ops, and more complex instructions are cracked intomultiple micro-ops. The micro-ops (Uops 232 b) are written into aunified issue queue 216, from where they can be issued out-of-order. Upto two fixed-point, one floating-point, two load/store, and two branchinstructions can execute every cycle. A Global Completion Table (GCT)232 holds every micro-op 232 b and a transaction nesting depth (TND) 232a. The GCT 232 is written in-order at decode time, tracks the executionstatus of each micro-op 232 b, and completes instructions when allmicro-ops 232 b of the oldest instruction group have successfullyexecuted.

The level 1 (L1) data cache 240 is a 96 KB (kilo-byte) 6-way associativecache with 256 byte cache-lines and 4 cycle use latency, coupled to aprivate 1 MB (mega-byte) 8-way associative 2nd-level (L2) data cache 268with 7 cycles use-latency penalty for L1 240 misses. The L1 240 cache isthe cache closest to a processor and Ln cache is a cache at the nthlevel of caching. Both L1 240 and L2 268 caches are store-through. Sixcores on each central processor (CP) chip share a 48 MB 3rd-levelstore-in cache, and six CP chips are connected to an off-chip 384 MB4th-level cache, packaged together on a glass ceramic multi-chip module(MCM). Up to 4 multi-chip modules (MCMs) can be connected to a coherentsymmetric multi-processor (SMP) system with up to 144 cores (not allcores are available to run customer workload).

Coherency is managed with a variant of the MESI protocol. Cache-linescan be owned read-only (shared) or exclusive; the L1 240 and L2 268 arestore-through and thus do not contain dirty lines. The L3 272 and L4caches (not shown) are store-in and track dirty states. Each cache isinclusive of all its connected lower level caches.

Coherency requests are called “cross interrogates” (XI) and are senthierarchically from higher level to lower-level caches, and between theL4s. When one core misses the L1 240 and L2 268 and requests the cacheline from its local L3 272, the L3 272 checks whether it owns the line,and if necessary sends an XI to the currently owning L2 268/L1 240 underthat L3 272 to ensure coherency, before it returns the cache line to therequestor. If the request also misses the L3 272, the L3 272 sends arequest to the L4 (not shown), which enforces coherency by sending XIsto all necessary L3s under that L4, and to the neighboring L4s. Then theL4 responds to the requesting L3 which forwards the response to the L2268/L1 240.

Note that due to the inclusivity rule of the cache hierarchy, sometimescache lines are XI'ed from lower-level caches due to evictions onhigher-level caches caused by associativity overflows from requests toother cache lines. These XIs can be called “LRU XIs”, where LRU standsfor least recently used.

Making reference to yet another type of XI requests, Demote-XIstransition cache-ownership from exclusive into read-only state, andExclusive-XIs transition cache ownership from exclusive into invalidstate. Demote-XIs and Exclusive-XIs need a response back to the XIsender. The target cache can “accept” the XI, or send a “reject”response if it first needs to evict dirty data before accepting the XI.The L1 240/L2 268 caches are store through, but may reject demote-XIsand exclusive XIs if they have stores in their store queues that need tobe sent to L3 before downgrading the exclusive state. A rejected XI willbe repeated by the sender. Read-only-XIs are sent to caches that own theline read-only; no response is needed for such XIs since they cannot berejected. The details of the SMP protocol are similar to those describedfor the IBM z10 by P. Mak, C. Walters, and G. Strait, in “IBM System z10processor cache subsystem microarchitecture”, IBM Journal of Researchand Development, Vol 53:1, 2009, which is incorporated by referenceherein in its entirety.

Transactional Instruction Execution

FIG. 3 depicts example components of an example transactional executionenvironment, including a CPU and caches/components with which itinteracts (such as those depicted in FIGS. 1 and 2). The instructiondecode unit 208 (IDU) keeps track of the current transaction nestingdepth 212 (TND). When the IDU 208 receives a TBEGIN instruction, thenesting depth 212 is incremented, and conversely decremented on TENDinstructions. The nesting depth 212 is written into the GCT 232 forevery dispatched instruction. When a TBEGIN or TEND is decoded on aspeculative path that later gets flushed, the IDU's 208 nesting depth212 is refreshed from the youngest GCT 232 entry that is not flushed.The transactional state is also written into the issue queue 216 forconsumption by the execution units, mostly by the Load/Store Unit (LSU)280, which also has an effective address calculator 236 is included inthe LSU 280. The TBEGIN instruction may specify a transaction diagnosticblock (TDB) for recording status information, should the transactionabort before reaching a TEND instruction.

Similar to the nesting depth, the IDU 208/GCT 232 collaboratively trackthe access register/floating-point register (AR/FPR) modification masksthrough the transaction nest; the IDU 208 can place an abort requestinto the GCT 232 when an AR/FPR-modifying instruction is decoded and themodification mask blocks that. When the instruction becomesnext-to-complete, completion is blocked and the transaction aborts.Other restricted instructions are handled similarly, including TBEGIN ifdecoded while in a constrained transaction, or exceeding the maximumnesting depth.

An outermost TBEGIN is cracked into multiple micro-ops depending on theGR-Save-Mask; each micro-op 232 b (including, for example uop 0, uop 1,and uop2) will be executed by one of the two fixed point units (FXUs)220 to save a pair of GRs 228 into a special transaction-backup registerfile 224, that is used to later restore the GR 228 content in case of atransaction abort. Also the TBEGIN spawns micro-ops 232 b to perform anaccessibility test for the TDB if one is specified; the address is savedin a special purpose register for later usage in the abort case. At thedecoding of an outermost TBEGIN, the instruction address and theinstruction text of the TBEGIN are also saved in special purposeregisters for a potential abort processing later on.

TEND and NTSTG are single micro-op 232 b instructions; NTSTG(non-transactional store) is handled like a normal store except that itis marked as non-transactional in the issue queue 216 so that the LSU280 can treat it appropriately. TEND is a no-op at execution time, theending of the transaction is performed when TEND completes.

As mentioned, instructions that are within a transaction are marked assuch in the issue queue 216, but otherwise execute mostly unchanged; theLSU 280 performs isolation tracking as described in the next section.

Since decoding is in-order, and since the IDU 208 keeps track of thecurrent transactional state and writes it into the issue queue 216 alongwith every instruction from the transaction, execution of TBEGIN, TEND,and instructions before, within, and after the transaction can beperformed out-of order. It is even possible (though unlikely) that TENDis executed first, then the entire transaction, and lastly the TBEGINexecutes. Program order is restored through the GCT 232 at completiontime. The length of transactions is not limited by the size of the GCT232, since general purpose registers (GRs) 228 can be restored from thebackup register file 224.

During execution, the program event recording (PER) events are filteredbased on the Event Suppression Control, and a PER TEND event is detectedif enabled. Similarly, while in transactional mode, a pseudo-randomgenerator may be causing the random aborts as enabled by the TransactionDiagnostics Control.

Tracking for Transactional Isolation

The Load/Store Unit 280 tracks cache lines that were accessed duringtransactional execution, and triggers an abort if an XI from another CPU(or an LRU-XI) conflicts with the footprint. If the conflicting XI is anexclusive or demote XI, the LSU 280 rejects the XI back to the L3 272 inthe hope of finishing the transaction before the L3 272 repeats the XI.This “stiff-arming” is very efficient in highly contended transactions.In order to prevent hangs when two CPUs stiff-arm each other, aXI-reject counter is implemented, which triggers a transaction abortwhen a threshold is met.

The L1 cache directory 240 is traditionally implemented with staticrandom access memories (SRAMs). For the transactional memoryimplementation, the valid bits 244 (64 rows×6 ways) of the directoryhave been moved into normal logic latches, and are supplemented with twomore bits per cache line: the TX-read 248 and TX-dirty 252 bits.

The TX-read 248 bits are reset when a new outermost TBEGIN is decoded(which is interlocked against a prior still pending transaction). TheTX-read 248 bit is set at execution time by every load instruction thatis marked “transactional” in the issue queue. Note that this can lead toover-marking if speculative loads are executed, for example on amispredicted branch path. The alternative of setting the TX-read 248 bitat load completion time was too expensive for silicon area, sincemultiple loads can complete at the same time, requiring many read-portson the load-queue.

Stores execute the same way as in non-transactional mode, but atransaction mark is placed in the store queue (STQ) 260 entry of thestore instruction. At write-back time, when the data from the STQ 260 iswritten into the L1 240, the TX-dirty bit 252 in the L1-directory 256 isset for the written cache line. Store write-back into the L1 240 occursonly after the store instruction has completed, and at most one store iswritten back per cycle. Before completion and write-back, loads canaccess the data from the STQ 260 by means of store-forwarding; afterwrite-back, the CPU 114 (FIG. 2) can access the speculatively updateddata in the L1 240. If the transaction ends successfully, the TX-dirtybits 252 of all cache-lines are cleared, and also the TX-marks of notyet written stores are cleared in the STQ 260, effectively turning thepending stores into normal stores.

On a transaction abort, all pending transactional stores are invalidatedfrom the STQ 260, even those already completed. All cache lines thatwere modified by the transaction in the L1 240, that is, have theTX-dirty bit 252 on, have their valid bits turned off, effectivelyremoving them from the L1 240 cache instantaneously.

The architecture requires that before completing a new instruction, theisolation of the transaction read- and write-set is maintained. Thisisolation is ensured by stalling instruction completion at appropriatetimes when XIs are pending; speculative out-of order execution isallowed, optimistically assuming that the pending XIs are to differentaddresses and not actually cause a transaction conflict. This designfits very naturally with the XI-vs-completion interlocks that areimplemented on prior systems to ensure the strong memory ordering thatthe architecture requires.

When the L1 240 receives an XI, L1 240 accesses the directory to checkvalidity of the XI'ed address in the L1 240, and if the TX-read bit 248is active on the XI'ed line and the XI is not rejected, the LSU 280triggers an abort. When a cache line with active TX-read bit 248 isLRU'ed from the L1 240, a special LRU-extension vector remembers foreach of the 64 rows of the L1 240 that a TX-read line existed on thatrow. Since no precise address tracking exists for the LRU extensions,any non-rejected XI that hits a valid extension row the LSU 280 triggersan abort. Providing the LRU-extension effectively increases the readfootprint capability from the L1-size to the L2-size and associativity,provided no conflicts with other CPUs 114 (FIGS. 1 and 2) against thenon-precise LRU-extension tracking causes aborts.

The store footprint is limited by the store cache size (the store cacheis discussed in more detail below) and thus implicitly by the L2 268size and associativity. No LRU-extension action needs to be performedwhen a TX-dirty 252 cache line is LRU'ed from the L1 240.

Store Cache

In prior systems, since the L1 240 and L2 268 are store-through caches,every store instruction causes an L3 272 store access; with now 6 coresper L3 272 and further improved performance of each core, the store ratefor the L3 272 (and to a lesser extent for the L2 268) becomesproblematic for certain workloads. In order to avoid store queuingdelays, a gathering store cache 264 had to be added, that combinesstores to neighboring addresses before sending them to the L3 272.

For transactional memory performance, it is acceptable to invalidateevery TX-dirty 252 cache line from the L1 240 on transaction aborts,because the L2 268 cache is very close (7 cycles L1 240 miss penalty) tobring back the clean lines. However, it would be unacceptable forperformance (and silicon area for tracking) to have transactional storeswrite the L2 268 before the transaction ends and then invalidate alldirty L2 268 cache lines on abort (or even worse on the shared L3 272).

The two problems of store bandwidth and transactional memory storehandling can both be addressed with the gathering store cache 264. Thecache 264 is a circular queue of 64 entries, each entry holding 128bytes of data with byte-precise valid bits. In non-transactionaloperation, when a store is received from the LSU 280, the store cache264 checks whether an entry exists for the same address, and if sogathers the new store into the existing entry. If no entry exists, a newentry is written into the queue, and if the number of free entries fallsunder a threshold, the oldest entries are written back to the L2 268 andL3 272 caches.

When a new outermost transaction begins, all existing entries in thestore cache are marked closed so that no new stores can be gathered intothem, and eviction of those entries to L2 268 and L3 272 is started.From that point on, the transactional stores coming out of the LSU 280STQ 260 allocate new entries, or gather into existing transactionalentries. The write-back of those stores into L2 268 and L3 272 isblocked, until the transaction ends successfully; at that pointsubsequent (post-transaction) stores can continue to gather intoexisting entries, until the next transaction closes those entries again.

The store cache 264 is queried on every exclusive or demote XI, andcauses an XI reject if the XI compares to any active entry. If the coreis not completing further instructions while continuously rejecting XIs,the transaction is aborted at a certain threshold to avoid hangs.

The LSU 280 requests a transaction abort when the store cache 264overflows. The LSU 280 detects this condition when it tries to send anew store that cannot merge into an existing entry, and the entire storecache 264 is filled with stores from the current transaction. The storecache 264 is managed as a subset of the L2 268: while transactionallydirty lines can be evicted from the L1 240, they have to stay residentin the L2 268 throughout the transaction. The maximum store footprint isthus limited to the store cache size of 64×128 bytes, and it is alsolimited by the associativity of the L2 268. Since the L2 268 is 8-wayassociative and has 512 rows, it is typically large enough to not causetransaction aborts.

If a transaction aborts, the store cache 264 is notified and all entriesholding transactional data are invalidated. The store cache 264 also hasa mark per doubleword (8 bytes) whether the entry was written by a NTSTGinstruction—those doublewords stay valid across transaction aborts.

Millicode-Implemented Functions

Traditionally, IBM mainframe server processors contain a layer offirmware called millicode which performs complex functions like certainCISC instruction executions, interruption handling, systemsynchronization, and RAS. Millicode includes machine dependentinstructions as well as instructions of the instruction set architecture(ISA) that are fetched and executed from memory similarly toinstructions of application programs and the operating system (OS).Firmware resides in a restricted area of main memory that customerprograms cannot access. When hardware detects a situation that needs toinvoke millicode, the instruction fetching unit 204 switches into“millicode mode” and starts fetching at the appropriate location in themillicode memory area. Millicode may be fetched and executed in the sameway as instructions of the instruction set architecture (ISA), and mayinclude ISA instructions.

For transactional memory, millicode is involved in various complexsituations. Every transaction abort invokes a dedicated millicodesub-routine to perform the necessary abort steps. The transaction-abortmillicode starts by reading special-purpose registers (SPRs) holding thehardware internal abort reason, potential exception reasons, and theaborted instruction address, which millicode then uses to store a TDB ifone is specified. The TBEGIN instruction text is loaded from an SPR toobtain the GR-save-mask, which is needed for millicode to know which GRs238 to restore.

The CPU 114 (FIG. 2) supports a special millicode-only instruction toread out the backup-GRs 224 and copy them into the main GRs 228. TheTBEGIN instruction address is also loaded from an SPR to set the newinstruction address in the PSW to continue execution after the TBEGINonce the millicode abort sub-routine finishes. That PSW may later besaved as program-old PSW in case the abort is caused by a non-filteredprogram interruption.

The TABORT instruction may be millicode implemented; when the IDU 208decodes TABORT, it instructs the instruction fetch unit to branch intoTABORT's millicode, from which millicode branches into the common abortsub-routine.

The Extract Transaction Nesting Depth (ETND) instruction may also bemillicoded, since it is not performance critical; millicode loads thecurrent nesting depth out of a special hardware register and places itinto a GR 228. The PPA instruction is millicoded; it performs theoptimal delay based on the current abort count provided by software asan operand to PPA, and also based on other hardware internal state.

For constrained transactions, millicode may keep track of the number ofaborts. The counter is reset to 0 on successful TEND completion, or ifan interruption into the OS occurs (since it is not known if or when theOS will return to the program). Depending on the current abort count,millicode can invoke certain mechanisms to improve the chance of successfor the subsequent transaction retry. The mechanisms involve, forexample, successively increasing random delays between retries, andreducing the amount of speculative execution to avoid encounteringaborts caused by speculative accesses to data that the transaction isnot actually using. As a last resort, millicode can broadcast to otherCPUs 114 (FIG. 2) to stop all conflicting work, retry the localtransaction, before releasing the other CPUs 114 to continue normalprocessing. Multiple CPUs 114 must be coordinated to not causedeadlocks, so some serialization between millicode instances ondifferent CPUs 114 is required.

Computer software applications may be processed on CPUs as a stream ofprogram instructions. Correct execution of that stream of programinstructions in an application program may be crucial, especially forcritical applications. Transient erroneous execution failures may, forexample, change logic values in a circuit due to the presence of chargedparticles in the environment. As more and more functionality is storedon a hardware chip, the likelihood of a radiation induced transientfailure increases. Transient failures may cause data manipulated withinthe computer software application to be corrupted. Recognizing andhandling transient failures allows computer software applications to bemore resilient and may allow the computer software application toreliably utilize any calculations or other tasks accomplished in theapplication.

A machine check raised for a transient failure may prevent datacorruption in the computer software application, but it does not allowthe application to move forward. Critical applications may recover fromsuch transient failures by repeating the execution of a part of theprogram instructions when a transient failure is detected. Typically,the program instructions may be repeated from a last computer softwareapplication checkpoint. Check-pointing by a computer softwareapplication may cause the computer software application to be writtensuch that its state may be rolled back to a previous value, known to becorrect, and then re-executed from that roll back point. Computersoftware application check-pointing may be done at large time intervals,causing a large number of performed calculations to be repeated uponerror detection. Thus, in one or more embodiments of the disclosure, itmay be desirable for computer software applications, especially criticalapplications, to divide the computer software application stream ofprogram instructions into sets of transactions to advantageously use thedesign and recovery capabilities of transactional execution to createfiner granularity check-pointing and to allow for recovery fromtransient failures.

Typically, detection of transient erroneous execution failures requiresmultiple executions of the same program to run in parallel and inlockstep or requires multiple executions to compare program results.Detection of transient erroneous execution failures may also requirededicated hardware to perform cycle-by-cycle comparison of parallelexecution results. Soft errors, like transient erroneous executionfailures, may also be transient and cause wrong results. A soft errormay corrupt a register value, causing a wrong computational result.Parity bits (a bit added to the end of a string of binary code thatindicates whether the number of bits in the string with the value one iseven or odd) may be one way to detect soft errors. Self auditing latchesand transactional digests may also recognize transient errors thatcorrupt data. The above errors may be referred to collectively as“hardware faults.”

Referring now to FIG. 4, an exemplary schematic block diagramillustrating an error checking mechanism in accordance with anembodiment of the disclosure is depicted. In one embodiment, a dataproducer 410 and a data consumer 420 may be hardware components of amicroprocessor including, but not limited to, a register file, a cacheand a compute unit. In one embodiment, the data producer 410 maytransmit data 415 on a hardware mechanism, such as a chip, along witherror detection information 425. A parity bit may be an example of errordetection information. An error code checker 430 may verify, using theerror detection information 425, that the data 415 coming out the otherend of the chip has not been corrupted before sending the data 415 on tothe data consumer 420. In another embodiment, the data producer 410 maytransmit the data 415 and the error detection information 425 on atemporal mechanism such as processor memory. In an exemplary embodimenta register file may be stored in memory as the data 415, along with aparity bit as the error detection information 425. When retrieving theregister file from memory, the error code checker 430 may verify theparity to ensure the data 415 was not corrupted either during thestorage into memory, during the retrieval from memory or while stored inmemory. Errors detected by the error code checker 430 may raise amachine check for the detected error, preventing data corruption of acomputer software application and ending the execution of the computersoftware application.

In one or more embodiments of the disclosure, transactions encounteringhardware faults including those detected by parity bit errors,self-auditing latch errors (i.e., when a latch indicates that it hassuffered a transient fault in accordance with latch designs described inprior art), hardware pairing errors, transactional digest mismatches andany other failure mechanisms existing now or in the future, may beautomatically recovered. Typically, hardware faults may only berecovered when backup copies of data are maintained, but in embodimentsof the disclosure, transactional execution retry may provide a mechanismto recover from hardware faults without maintaining data backup copies,without lockstep execution and with only a single thread.

In embodiments of the disclosure, computer software applications may beexecuted as a series of transactions without requiring computer softwareapplication modification. The computer software application's stream ofprogram instructions may be divided into sets of transactions. The startand stop of each transaction may be determined either by a hardwaremechanism, or by an instruction. In at least one embodiment, thetransaction start and end-mode test point instructions may be insertedduring the computer software application compilation. In at least oneother embodiment, the transaction start and end-mode test pointinstructions may be inserted during instruction fetch.

Now referring to FIG. 5, a flowchart 500 illustrates operationsperformed by a processor 114 (FIG. 9) for executing a transaction withina stream of program instructions and recovering from a hardware faultusing transactional execution capabilities, within the data processingenvironment of FIG. 9. The flowchart 500 illustrates an embodiment ofthe disclosure in which the computer software application's stream ofprogram instructions may be divided into sets of transactions, each ofwhich may quickly recover from a hardware fault autonomously, withoutnotifying the computer software application. A mechanism may be providedfor privileged software, including but not limited to, an operatingsystem, a hypervisor and firmware (hereinafter “operating system”) torecover or abort the computer software application for a hardware fault.

In an embodiment, the processor 114 (FIG. 9) may begin processing astream of program instructions for a computer software application, at510. At 520, the processor 114 (FIG. 9), on behalf of the operatingsystem or due to a start transaction instruction, may initiate atransaction for a subset of the computer software application'sinstructions. Embodiments to dynamically initiate a transaction by theoperating system will be described in more detail below, with referenceto FIG. 8. Upon initiating the transaction for the subset of programinstructions, the processor 114 (FIG. 9) may, at 530, save a snapshot ofthe system state information. The system state information may include,but is not limited to, processor control values, register values, andcheck-pointed memory. The processor 114 (FIG. 9) may, at 535, executethe subset of program instruction in the transaction and may iterate, at545, until the transaction completes. Upon completion of thetransaction, determined at 545, the processor 114 (FIG. 9) may committhe transaction store data to memory, at 560. If the computer softwareapplication's stream of program instructions have not all been executed,as determined at 565, the processor 114 (FIG. 9) may continue execution,at 590, with the program instruction following the end-mode test point.The processor 114 (FIG. 9) may then initiate a new transaction, at 520,for another subset of the program instructions, starting with theprogram instruction following the end-mode test point. If no additionalprogram instructions remain in the computer software application'sstream of program instructions, as determined at 565, the computersoftware application may complete, at 569.

An error condition may occur during execution of a transactioninstruction and interrupt the transactional execution. The errorcondition including, but not limited to, a hardware fault, atransactional digest mismatch, and transactional data interference maybe sent to the processor 114 (FIG. 9), at 550. The processor 114 (FIG.9) may determine, at 555, whether the transaction may be directlyrecovered. The determination that a transaction is directly recoverablemay include, but is not limited to, the processor 114 (FIG. 9) obtainingnotification that a resource encountered an error condition andobtaining the saved snapshot of the system state. For a resource savedin the snapshot of the system state at the beginning of the transactionor for a resource not required as input to the transaction, theprocessor 114 (FIG. 9) may determine, at 555, that the transaction isdirectly recoverable and may utilize the transactional executionproperties of the system to recover from the hardware fault. Theprocessor 114 (FIG. 9) may, for the directly recoverable transaction,internally abort the transaction, without notifying the computersoftware application, and restart the transaction. The processor may, at580, flush the system state, discard the transactional store data,restore the system state from the saved snapshot of the system state,reset any failed resources from the saved snapshot of the system stateand restart the transaction, at 535, automatically, without notifyingthe computer software application. A retry of the transaction may besuccessful for a transient erroneous execution error or soft error. Inan embodiment, the processor 114 (FIG. 9) may generate a log entry torecord the occurrence of and information related to the hardware fault.In an embodiment the processor 114 (FIG. 9) may repetitively restart thetransaction until a threshold number of unsuccessful attempts have beenmade. Repeated hardware faults on a resource may be an indicator ofimpending hardware failure. Upon reaching the threshold number of retryattempts, the processor 114 (FIG. 9) may determine the transaction maynot be directly recoverable. In one or more embodiments, for a hardwarefault that has been determined, at 555, to not be directly recoverable,the processor 114 (FIG. 9) may perform other recovery actions, at 600,700. In one embodiment in which the transaction has been determined, at555, to not be directly recoverable, the processor 114 (FIG. 9) mayutilize software to perform other recovery actions. This embodiment willbe described in detail below, with reference to FIG. 6. In anotherembodiment in which the transaction has been determined, at 555, to notbe directly recoverable, the processor 114 (FIG. 9) may utilize ahardware exception to asynchronously perform other recovery actions.This embodiment will be described in detail below, with reference toFIG. 7. In yet another embodiment in which the transaction has beendetermined, at 555, to not be directly recoverable, the processor 114(FIG. 9) may perform no other recovery actions but may, instead,generate a hardware exception and fail the computer softwareapplication.

Now referring to FIG. 6, a flowchart 600 illustrates operationsperformed by the processor 114 (FIG. 9) for performing recovery actionsfor an error condition determined not to be directly recoverable, withinthe data processing environment of FIG. 9. The flowchart 600 illustratesan embodiment of the disclosure in which the processor 114 (FIG. 9) mayutilize software to recover from a hardware fault. In one embodiment,after determining, by the processor 114 (FIG. 9), that a transaction maynot be directly recoverable from an error condition (see 555, FIG. 5),the processor 114 (FIG. 9) may, at 610 determine the cause of the errorcondition. Error conditions that may not be directly recoverable mayinclude, but are not limited to, soft errors and transient erroneousexecution errors on resources that may not have been saved in thesnapshot of the system state, repetitive hardware faults andtransactional data interference. In one or more embodiments, the causeof the error condition may be determined from information stored in anyone of a control register, a transaction data block or a statusregister. The stored information may identify the type of errorcondition encountered, such as a transient hardware fault, and may alsoindicate whether the failing resource may be recovered from datacheck-pointed by the transaction.

For an error condition determined to be transactional data interference,the processor 114 (FIG. 9) may, at 620, abort the transaction and notifythe initiator of the transaction of the abort condition. The initiatorof the transaction may handle the transactional data interference abortutilizing known techniques. The transaction initiator may be thecomputer software application or the operating system. For an errorcondition determined to be a non-directly recoverable hardware fault,the processor 114 (FIG. 9) may, at 625, abort the transaction with anabort reason code that signals a hardware fault caused the abort. Theprocessor 114 (FIG. 9) may also provide failure information with thehardware fault abort including, but not limited to, an abort reasonindicating the reason for the hardware fault and the one or moreresources encountering the hardware fault. Exemplary reasons for thehardware fault include parity errors and execution unit malfunction. Theprocessor 114 (FIG. 9) may notify the operating system of thetransaction abort condition without notifying the computer softwareapplication.

After the transaction has been aborted for a hardware fault, at 625, theprocessor 114 (FIG. 9) may receive control asynchronously, at 635, forthe aborted transaction. The processor 114 (FIG. 9) may determine, at635, if the failing resource that caused the transactional abort, may besoftware recovered. The failing resource may be software recovered bythe processor 114 (FIG. 9) if the failing resource was check-pointed inthe software prior to executing the transaction. In an exemplaryembodiment, the computer software application may checkpoint registersin a known register area prior to transactional execution, but they maynot be saved in the system snapshot. In this exemplary embodiment, afailed register may not be directly recovered from the saved snapshot ofthe system state, but may be restored from the known register area.

For a transaction whose failing resources may be software recovered, asdetermined at 635, the processor 114 (FIG. 9) may utilize thetransactional execution properties of the system to recover from thehardware fault by combining software recovery of the softwarerecoverable state and transaction-based recovery of other stateinformation. The processor 114 (FIG. 9) may internally abort thetransaction, without notifying the computer software application andrestart the transaction. This embodiment may, at 640, flush the systemstate, discard the transactional store data, restore the system statefrom the saved snapshot of the system state and reset any failedresources from the check-pointed data. The processor 114 (FIG. 9) may,at 645, generate a log entry to record the occurrence of the hardwarefault and restart the transaction at 520 (FIG. 5). In an embodiment theprocessor 114 (FIG. 9) may repetitively restart an aborted transaction,at 520 (FIG. 5), until a threshold number of unsuccessful attempts havebeen made. Retrying the transaction may be successful for a transienterroneous execution error or soft error. Repeated hardware faults on aresource may be an indicator of impending hardware failure. Uponreaching the threshold number of retry attempts, the processor 114 (FIG.9) may determine the transaction may not be software recoverable. For ahardware fault that has been determined, at 635, to not be softwarerecoverable, either for repeated failure or for a failed resource thathad not been check-pointed prior to the transaction, the processor 114(FIG. 9) may, at 650, generate a log entry to record the occurrence ofthe hardware fault and may perform other recovery actions, at 700. Inone embodiment in which the transaction has been determined, at 635, tonot be software recoverable, the processor 114 (FIG. 9) may utilize ahardware exception to asynchronously perform other recovery actions.This embodiment will be described in detail below, with reference toFIG. 7. In another embodiment in which the transaction has beendetermined, at 635, to not be software recoverable, the processor 114(FIG. 9) may perform no other recovery actions but may, instead,generate a hardware exception and fail the computer softwareapplication.

Utilizing software to recover from hardware faults may be a lessefficient mechanism than hardware alone. Software recovery options mayexpend additional execution cycles and may require modifications toexisting transactional recovery to recognize hardware fault abortreasons and to handle single event upset transient failure aborts, butsoftware recovery may expand recovery options and allow transactions tobe more reliable.

Now referring to FIG. 7, a flowchart 700 illustrates operationsperformed by the processor 114 (FIG. 9) for performing additionalrecovery actions for an error condition determined to not be softwarerecoverable, within the data processing environment of FIG. 9. It shouldbe noted that the embodiment described below may follow thedetermination, at 545 (FIG. 5) or 635 (FIG. 6) where the transaction wasnot directly recoverable or software recoverable. The flowchart 700illustrates an embodiment of the disclosure in which the processor 114(FIG. 9) may attempt to utilize transactional execution mechanisms torecover from a hardware exception caused by a hardware fault. In oneembodiment, the operations of flowchart 700 are performed after theprocessor has unsuccessfully attempted to recover utilizing embodimentsof flowchart 500 (FIG. 5) and flowchart 600 (FIG. 6).

In one or more embodiments, hardware may perform analysis of thehardware fault and provide diagnostic information including, but notlimited to, lists of failing resources, and reasons for failures. Thediagnostic information may be stored in system areas including, but notlimited to memory and control registers. In an embodiment, the processor114 (FIG. 9) may, after receiving a hardware exception, determine, at715, if the transaction may be moved to other resources. The transactionmay be moved when duplicate resources exist to replace the failingresources and transactional data for failed resources may be recoveredfrom either hardware or software. If alternate resources exist, theprocessor 114 (FIG. 9) may, at 720, evacuate the work to anotherprocessor either by hardware or by initiating a service notification orby passing control to an operating system to address the hardwarefaults. Failing execution units may be disabled when alternate unitsexist and may be utilized in their place. The processor 114 (FIG. 9)may, at 740, advantageously utilize transactional execution capabilitiesto flush the system state, discard the transactional store data, restorethe system state from the saved snapshot of the system state, reset anyfailed resource data and retry the transaction on the alternateresources. For a transaction that may not be moved, as determined at715, the processor 114 (FIG. 9) may, at 730, fail the computer softwareapplication containing the transaction that could not be moved orrestarted on alternate resources.

In one or more embodiments, a hardware exception may be the initialnotification mechanism of a hardware fault and an operating system mayreceive control directly, thus avoiding a transactional abort forhardware faults. Avoiding transactional aborts for hardware faults maysimplify computer software application abort handling by eliminating theneed for computer software applications to be modified to recognize andhandle hardware faults. The processor 114 (FIG. 9) executing operatingsystem code, may utilize diagnostic data provided by the hardwareexception to determine if the hardware fault is directly recoverable. Ifdirectly recoverable, the processor 114 (FIG. 9) may roll back thetransaction and retry. For hardware faults that may not be directlyrecoverable, the processor 114 (FIG. 9) may abort the transaction withan abort code that may signal to the to a computer software applicationequipped to recognize a hardware fault abort code, that the transactionfailed. Other embodiments may transfer control to an Event Based Branchroutine or fail the computer software application.

In another embodiment, the hardware exception may flow to millicode,burned onto a chip, rather than an operating system. The millicode mayperform analysis of the hardware fault to determine if the transactionmay be restarted, may keep track of a retry threshold and may eveninitiate evacuation to an alternate processor or other alternateresources and restart. Providing support in millicode may improverecovery speed over providing support in software. In one or moreembodiments, if the millicode encounters unrecoverable hardware faults,it may transfer control to an Event Based Branch routine or an operatingsystem to continue the recovery actions.

In another embodiment, the processor 114 (FIG. 9) may transfer controldirectly to a computer software application's Event Based Branch routinefor a hardware fault. An Event Based Branch routine may handle recoveryfrom a hardware fault at the computer software application level ratherthan a system level. In this embodiment, the application may be requiredto build recovery for transactional execution failure due to hardwarefaults. Transferring control to an Event Based Branch routine mayrequire less overhead to process than a hardware exception. Creating acommon recovery routine may ease the burden of requiring all computersoftware applications to provide transactional execution recoveryroutines for hardware faults. In one or more embodiments, the hardwaremay perform analysis of the hardware fault and provide diagnosticinformation including, but not limited to, failing resources, andreasons for failure. The diagnostic information may be stored in systemareas including, but not limited to memory and control registers. Theprocessor 114 (FIG. 9) executing the Event Based Branch code may utilizethe diagnostic data to determine if the hardware fault is directlyrecoverable. If directly recoverable, the processor 114 (FIG. 9) mayroll back the transaction and retry. For hardware faults that are notdirectly recoverable, the processor 114 (FIG. 9) may abort thetransaction with an abort code that may signal to the to a computersoftware application equipped to recognize a hardware fault abort code,that the transaction failed. Other embodiments may fail the computersoftware application. Utilizing an Event Based Branch may reduceoverhead compared to using operating system level functions, and mayalso enable the programmer to integrate recovery more tightly with aspecific application when compared to an exception handling routineperforming recovery at an operating system level. On the other hand,using Event Based Branches in lieu of transaction abort may allowcomputer software applications to centralize recovery within theapplication rather than replicate recovery logic in conjunction witheach transaction.

Now referring to FIG. 8, a flowchart 1000 illustrates operationsperformed by the processor 114 (FIG. 9) for dynamically creatingtransactional regions in an input stream of program instruction duringinstruction fetch, within the data processing environment of FIG. 9. Theflowchart 1000 illustrates an embodiment of the disclosure in which theprocessor 114 (FIG. 9), may inject a transaction begin instruction and atransaction end instruction into the instruction stream of a computersoftware application in order to improve reliability and recoverabilityof the application without causing computer software applicationmodification. In one embodiment, end-mode test points may be injectedinto the input stream of program instructions to determine the beginningand end of a dynamically created transactional region. In one or moreembodiments, the end-mode test points may be a transaction begin and atransaction end instruction. Since the computer software application maybe unmodified and unaware of the dynamically created transactionalregions during fetch, only directly recoverable hardware faultsdescribed above, with reference to FIG. 5, may be handled for thesedynamically created transactional regions. It should also be noted thatsome instructions may not be suitable to be executed within atransactional region and when encountered by fetch may cause an end-modetest point to be injected to end the dynamically created transactionalregion. The instruction may then be executed non-transactionally.

In an embodiment, the processor 114 (FIG. 9) may dynamically create thenext transactional region immediately following the end-mode test point.In another embodiment, the processor 114 (FIG. 16) may execute a numberof instructions non-transactionally prior to dynamically creating thenext transactional region. The number of instructions may be as small asone instruction. In an embodiment, the number of instructions executednon-transactionally prior to dynamically creating the next transactionalregion may be a function of the maximum size of the dynamically createdtransactional region. The number “n” of instructions executednon-transactionally prior to the processor 114 (FIG. 9) dynamicallycreating the next transactional region may be a function of the size ofthe transactional region, where “k” may be a number, and where “size”may be the maximum size of the dynamically created transactional region.The function may include, but is not limited to, n=function(size) suchas n=size, n=size/k, and n=size*k.

In an embodiment, the processor 114 (FIG. 9) may, at 1010, fetch anddecode an instruction from the stream of program instructions. At thispoint, a dynamically created transactional region may not be executing.For a fetched and decoded transaction begin or transaction endinstruction, as determined at 1015, the decoded transactionbegin/transaction end instruction may be queued, at 1020, for processingand another instruction fetched and decoded at 1010. A transaction beginor transaction end instruction fetched outside of a dynamically createdtransactional region may be processed non-transactionally. For a fetchedand decoded instruction that may not be a transaction begin ortransaction end instruction, as determined at 1015, a dynamicallycreated transactional region may be started. The processor may, at 1030,initialize the size of the dynamically created transactional region toone. A transaction begin instruction may then, at 1032, be injected bythe processor 114 (FIG. 9) into the stream of program instructions. Theprocessor 114 (FIG. 9) may then, at 1034, queue the fetched and decodedinstruction for processing and increment the size of the dynamicallycreated transactional region, at 1036. The processor 114 (FIG. 9) maythen fetch and decode a next instruction from the stream of programinstructions, at 1038. If the next instruction fetched and decoded is atransaction begin instruction or a transaction end instruction,determined at 1040, and is the transaction begin instruction injected at1032, determined at 1045, the fetched and decoded injected transactionbegin instruction may be queued for processing, at 1036.

For the next instruction, determined at 1040 to not be a transactionbegin or transaction end instruction, and determined at 1050 to fitwithin the maximum dynamically created transactional region size(Size<=Max Group Size), the fetched and decoded instruction may bequeued for processing at 1034. The processor 114 (FIG. 9) may continueto dynamically add instructions to the transactional region until eitherthe maximum dynamically created transactional region size has beenreached (Size>Max Group Size), at 1050, or the fetched and decodedinstruction may be a transaction begin or transaction end, determined at1040. A fetched and decoded transaction end instruction, as determinedat 1040, or a fetched and decoded transaction begin instruction that isnot an injected transaction begin instruction, as determined at 1045,may end the dynamically created transactional region. The processor 114(FIG. 9) may end the dynamically created transactional region byinjecting, at 1060, a transaction end instruction into the stream ofprogram instructions and queuing the fetched and decoded transactionbegin/transaction end instruction for processing at 1020. When themaximum size of a dynamically created transaction region has beenreached, at 1050, the processor 114 (FIG. 9) may end the dynamicallycreated transactional region by injecting a transaction end instructioninto the stream of program instructions at 1070, and queuing the fetchedand decoded instruction for processing, at 1080. The processor 114 (FIG.9) may then fetch and decode a next instruction from the stream ofprogram instructions, at 1010, outside of a dynamically createdtransactional region.

In an embodiment, the processor 114 (FIG. 9) may determine the maximumsize of a dynamically created transaction region based on one or more ofresource limits and code size characteristics. In another embodiment,the end-mode test point may be an instruction including a parameter usedby the operating system to determine when to start and stop adynamically created transactional region. The parameter may indicate oneor more of a static maximum size of the dynamically createdtransactional region and a formula for determining the maximum size.

In another embodiment, the processor 114 (FIG. 9) may adapt the maximumsize of the dynamically created transactional regions based on thesuccess of prior transactions. Successive successful executions ofdynamically created transactional regions may increase the maximum sizeand aborts of the transactional regions may decrease the maximum size.

Referring now to handling transactional aborts in dynamically createdtransaction regions due to exceeding buffer limits or data interference.In one embodiment, the processor 114 (FIG. 9) may commit the store dataof the dynamically created transactional region. In this embodiment, theexecution may appear as a non-transactional state in a multiprocessorenvironment.

In another embodiment, the processor 114 (FIG. 9) may roll back thetransaction. In conjunction with the roll back, the processor 114 (FIG.9) may delay the creation of the next dynamically created transactionalregion. In one embodiment, the processor 114 (FIG. 16) may execute astatic number of instructions non-transactionally prior to dynamicallycreating the next transactional region. The number of staticinstructions may be as small as one instruction. In another embodiment,the number of instructions executed non-transactionally prior todynamically creating the next transactional region may be a function ofthe maximum size of the dynamically created transactional region. Thenumber “n” of instructions executed non-transactionally prior to theprocessor 114 (FIG. 9) dynamically creating the next transactionalregion may be a function of the size of the transactional region, where“k” may be a number, and where “size” may be the maximum size of adynamically created transactional region. The function may include, butis not limited to, n=function(size) such as n=size, n=size/k, andn=size*k. In another embodiment, the processor 114 (FIG. 9) mayimmediately begin dynamically creating transactional regions after afirst roll back, but may delay as described above for a subsequentabort.

Referring now to FIG. 9, computer system 1600 may include respectivesets of internal components 800 and external components 900. Each of thesets of internal components 800 includes one or more processors 114; oneor more computer-readable RAMs 822; one or more computer-readable ROMs824 on one or more buses 826; one or more operating systems 828; one ormore software applications 829; and one or more computer-readabletangible storage devices 830. The one or more operating systems 828 arestored on one or more of the respective computer-readable tangiblestorage devices 830 for execution by one or more of the respectiveprocessors 114 via one or more of the respective RAMs 822 (whichtypically include cache memory). The computer system 1600, in oneembodiment of the disclosure, supports the multicore transactionalmemory environment and TM-enabled processors of FIG. 1. FIG. 9illustrates the TM-enabled processors of FIG. 1, shown in the context ofa computer system, as processors 114 of the computer system 1600. Theprocessors 114, in this embodiment, are also configured to injecttransaction begin and end-mode test points in a stream of programinstruction during fetch. In the embodiment illustrated in FIG. 9, eachof the computer-readable tangible storage devices 830 is a magnetic diskstorage device of an internal hard drive. Alternatively, each of thecomputer-readable tangible storage devices 830 is a semiconductorstorage device such as ROM 824, EPROM, flash memory or any othercomputer-readable tangible storage device that can store a computerprogram and digital information.

Each set of internal components 800 also includes a R/W drive orinterface 832 to read from and write to one or more computer-readabletangible storage devices 936 such as a CD-ROM, DVD, SSD, memory stick,magnetic tape, magnetic disk, optical disk or semiconductor storagedevice.

Each set of internal components 800 may also include network adapters(or switch port cards) or interfaces 836 such as a TCP/IP adapter cards,wireless WI-FI interface cards, or 3G or 4G wireless interface cards orother wired or wireless communication links. The firmware 838 andoperating system 828 that are associated with computer system 1600, canbe downloaded to computer system 1600 from an external computer (e.g.,server) via a network (for example, the Internet, a local area networkor other, wide area network) and respective network adapters orinterfaces 836. From the network adapters (or switch port adapters) orinterfaces 836, the firmware 838 and operating system 828 associatedwith computer system 1600 are loaded into the respective hard drive 830and network adapter 836. The network may comprise copper wires, opticalfibers, wireless transmission, routers, firewalls, switches, gatewaycomputers and/or edge servers.

Each of the sets of external components 900 can include a computerdisplay monitor 920, a keyboard 930, and a computer mouse 934. Externalcomponents 900 can also include touch screens, virtual keyboards, touchpads, pointing devices, and other human interface devices. Each of thesets of internal components 800 also includes device drivers 840 tointerface to computer display monitor 920, keyboard 930 and computermouse 934. The device drivers 840, R/W drive or interface 832 andnetwork adapter or interface 836 comprise hardware and software (storedin storage device 830 and/or ROM 824).

Referring now to FIG. 10, in an embodiment of the disclosure, a computersystem may execute each portion of a stream of program instructions as atransaction for reliability. The computer system may, at 1110, determinethat an instruction in a portion of the stream of program instructionsis to begin a transaction in transactional execution mode. The computersystem may, at 1120, save a snapshot of a system state information andat 1130, execute the portion of the stream of program instructions as atransaction until an end-mode test point in the stream of programinstruction is reached.

Based on reaching the end-mode test point in the stream of programinstructions, the computer system may, at 1140, commit store data of thetransaction to memory. Based on the stream of program instructions notbeing complete, the computer system, at 1150, may iterate to 1110 toautomatically begin a new transaction in transactional execution mode ofa next portion of the stream of program instructions. When noinstructions remain in the stream of program instructions, the computersystem may complete the program at 1155. Based on encountering atransient failure, the computer system may, at 1160, cause an abort andreturn a specialized abort code with the abort to identify the transientfailure. For an aborted transaction, the computer system may, at 1170,re-execute the transaction based on the saved snapshot of the systemstate information. In another embodiment, the computer system may createa hardware interrupt providing failure mode information. The hardwareinterrupt may be handled by firmware or privileged software.

In an embodiment, the end-mode test point may be indicated by anexecution of an end-mode test point instruction, the end-mode test pointinstruction causing one transaction to end and a next transaction tobegin. In another embodiment, the end-mode test point may be based on anexecution of an end-mode test point parameter instruction, the executionof the end-mode test point parameter instruction setting parameters usedby the computer system to determine the end-mode test points in thestream of program instructions.

Various embodiments of the invention may be implemented in a dataprocessing system suitable for storing and/or executing program codethat includes at least one processor coupled directly or indirectly tomemory elements through a system bus. The memory elements include, forinstance, local memory employed during actual execution of the programcode, bulk storage, and cache memory which provide temporary storage ofat least some program code in order to reduce the number of times codemust be retrieved from bulk storage during execution.

Input/Output or I/O devices (including, but not limited to, keyboards,displays, pointing devices, DASD, tape, CDs, DVDs, thumb drives andother memory media, etc.) can be coupled to the system either directlyor through intervening I/O controllers. Network adapters may also becoupled to the system to enable the data processing system to becomecoupled to other data processing systems or remote printers or storagedevices through intervening private or public networks. Modems, cablemodems, and Ethernet cards are just a few of the available types ofnetwork adapters.

The present invention may be a system, a method, and/or a computerprogram product. The computer program product may include a computerreadable storage medium (or media) having computer readable programinstructions thereon for causing a processor to carry out aspects of thepresent invention.

The computer readable storage medium can be a tangible device that canretain and store instructions for use by an instruction executiondevice. The computer readable storage medium may be, for example, but isnot limited to, an electronic storage device, a magnetic storage device,an optical storage device, an electromagnetic storage device, asemiconductor storage device, or any suitable combination of theforegoing. A non-exhaustive list of more specific examples of thecomputer readable storage medium includes the following: a portablecomputer diskette, a hard disk, a random access memory (RAM), aread-only memory (ROM), an erasable programmable read-only memory (EPROMor Flash memory), a static random access memory (SRAM), a portablecompact disc read-only memory (CD-ROM), a digital versatile disk (DVD),a memory stick, a floppy disk, a mechanically encoded device such aspunch-cards or raised structures in a groove having instructionsrecorded thereon, and any suitable combination of the foregoing. Acomputer readable storage medium, as used herein, is not to be construedas being transitory signals per se, such as radio waves or other freelypropagating electromagnetic waves, electromagnetic waves propagatingthrough a waveguide or other transmission media (e.g., light pulsespassing through a fiber-optic cable), or electrical signals transmittedthrough a wire.

Computer readable program instructions described herein can bedownloaded to respective computing/processing devices from a computerreadable storage medium or to an external computer or external storagedevice via a network, for example, the Internet, a local area network, awide area network and/or a wireless network. The network may comprisecopper transmission cables, optical transmission fibers, wirelesstransmission, routers, firewalls, switches, gateway computers and/oredge servers. A network adapter card or network interface in eachcomputing/processing device receives computer readable programinstructions from the network and forwards the computer readable programinstructions for storage in a computer readable storage medium withinthe respective computing/processing device.

Computer readable program instructions for carrying out operations ofthe present invention may be assembler instructions,instruction-set-architecture (ISA) instructions, machine instructions,machine dependent instructions, microcode, firmware instructions,state-setting data, or either source code or object code written in anycombination of one or more programming languages, including an objectoriented programming language such as Java, Smalltalk, C++ or the like,and conventional procedural programming languages, such as the “C”programming language or similar programming languages. The computerreadable program instructions may execute entirely on the user'scomputer, partly on the user's computer, as a stand-alone softwarepackage, partly on the user's computer and partly on a remote computeror entirely on the remote computer or server. In the latter scenario,the remote computer may be connected to the user's computer through anytype of network, including a local area network (LAN) or a wide areanetwork (WAN), or the connection may be made to an external computer(for example, through the Internet using an Internet Service Provider).In some embodiments, electronic circuitry including, for example,programmable logic circuitry, field-programmable gate arrays (FPGA), orprogrammable logic arrays (PLA) may execute the computer readableprogram instructions by utilizing state information of the computerreadable program instructions to personalize the electronic circuitry,in order to perform aspects of the present invention.

Aspects of the present invention are described herein with reference toflowchart illustrations and/or block diagrams of methods, apparatus(systems), and computer program products according to embodiments of theinvention. It will be understood that each block of the flowchartillustrations and/or block diagrams, and combinations of blocks in theflowchart illustrations and/or block diagrams, can be implemented bycomputer readable program instructions.

These computer readable program instructions may be provided to aprocessor of a general purpose computer, special purpose computer, orother programmable data processing apparatus to produce a machine, suchthat the instructions, which execute via the processor of the computeror other programmable data processing apparatus, create means forimplementing the functions/acts specified in the flowchart and/or blockdiagram block or blocks. These computer readable program instructionsmay also be stored in a computer readable storage medium that can directa computer, a programmable data processing apparatus, and/or otherdevices to function in a particular manner, such that the computerreadable storage medium having instructions stored therein comprises anarticle of manufacture including instructions which implement aspects ofthe function/act specified in the flowchart and/or block diagram blockor blocks.

The computer readable program instructions may also be loaded onto acomputer, other programmable data processing apparatus, or other deviceto cause a series of operational steps to be performed on the computer,other programmable apparatus or other device to produce a computerimplemented process, such that the instructions which execute on thecomputer, other programmable apparatus, or other device implement thefunctions/acts specified in the flowchart and/or block diagram block orblocks.

The flowchart and block diagrams in the Figures illustrate thearchitecture, functionality, and operation of possible implementationsof systems, methods, and computer program products according to variousembodiments of the present invention. In this regard, each block in theflowchart or block diagrams may represent a module, segment, or portionof instructions, which comprises one or more executable instructions forimplementing the specified logical function(s). In some alternativeimplementations, the functions noted in the block may occur out of theorder noted in the figures. For example, two blocks shown in successionmay, in fact, be executed substantially concurrently, or the blocks maysometimes be executed in the reverse order, depending upon thefunctionality involved. It will also be noted that each block of theblock diagrams and/or flowchart illustration, and combinations of blocksin the block diagrams and/or flowchart illustration, can be implementedby special purpose hardware-based systems that perform the specifiedfunctions or acts or carry out combinations of special purpose hardwareand computer instructions.

Although one or more examples have been provided herein, these are onlyexamples. Many variations are possible without departing from the spiritof the present invention. For instance, processing environments otherthan the examples provided herein may include and/or benefit from one ormore aspects of the present invention. Further, the environment need notbe based on the z/Architecture®, but instead can be based on otherarchitectures offered by, for instance, IBM®, Intel®, Sun Microsystems,as well as others. Yet further, the environment can include multipleprocessors, be partitioned, and/or be coupled to other systems, asexamples.

As used herein, the term “obtaining” includes, but is not limited to,fetching, receiving, having, providing, being provided, creating,developing, etc.

The flow diagrams depicted herein are just examples. There may be manyvariations to these diagrams or the steps (or operations) describedtherein without departing from the spirit of the invention. Forinstance, the steps may be performed in a differing order, or steps maybe added, deleted, or modified. All of these variations are considered apart of the claimed invention.

Although preferred embodiments have been depicted and described indetail herein, it will be apparent to those skilled in the relevant artthat various modifications, additions, substitutions and the like can bemade without departing from the spirit of the invention, and these are,therefore, considered to be within the scope of the invention, asdefined in the following claims.

What is claimed is:
 1. A method for autonomous recovery from a transienthardware failure by executing each portion of a stream of programinstructions as a transaction, the method comprising: creating, by anoperating system on a computer system configured to supporttransactional execution mode processing, a start of a transactionalregion portion of a stream of program instructions, wherein the portionof the stream of program instructions in the transactional region is tobe executed as a transaction in transactional execution mode; inresponse to starting the transactional region in transactional executionmode: saving, by the operating system, a snapshot of a system stateinformation, executing, by the operating system, one or moreinstructions in the portion of the stream of program instructions as atransaction; and creating, by the operating system, an end of thetransactional region portion of the stream of program instructions; inresponse to ending execution of the transactional region in transactionexecution mode: committing, by the operating system, store data of thetransaction to memory; and responsive to a transient hardware failureaffecting a program resource required by one or more instructions in thetransactional region portion of the stream of program instructionsexecuting as a transaction in transactional execution mode: aborting, bythe operating system, the transaction without notifying a computersoftware application that initiated the stream of program instructions;and re-executing, by the operating system, the transactional regionportion of the stream of program instructions as a transaction intransactional execution mode, based on the saved snapshot of the systemstate information.
 2. The method according to claim 1, whereinresponsive to the transient hardware failure affecting the programresource required by the one or more instructions in the transactionalregion portion of the stream of program instructions executing as atransaction in transactional execution mode further comprises:returning, by the operating system, a specialized abort code with theabort identifying the transient hardware failure.
 3. The methodaccording to claim 1, wherein responsive to the transient hardwarefailure affecting the program resource required by the one or moreinstructions in the transactional region portion of the stream ofprogram instructions executing as a transaction in transactionalexecution mode further comprises: creating, by the operating system, ahardware interrupt, the interrupt handled by one of firmware orprivileged software; and providing, by the operating system, failureinformation.
 4. The method according to claim 1, wherein endingexecution of the transactional region in transaction execution modefurther comprises: responsive to a next portion of the stream of programinstructions follows the created end of the transactional region portionof the stream of program instructions, automatically creating, by theoperating system, a start of a second transactional region of the nextportion of the stream of program instructions.
 5. The method accordingto claim 1, wherein re-executing, by the operating system, thetransactional region portion of the stream of program instructions as atransaction executing in transactional execution mode, based on thesaved snapshot of the system state information is further based on oneor more of: determining, by the operating system, the transient hardwarefailure affected the program resource that is in the saved snapshot ofthe system state information, and determining, by the operating system,the transient hardware failure affected the program resource that is notrequired as input to the re-executed transactional region portion of thestream of program instructions.
 6. A computer program product forautonomous recovery from a transient hardware failure by executing eachportion of a stream of program instructions as a transaction, thecomputer program product comprising: a computer readable storage mediumreadable by a processing circuit and storing instructions for executionby the processing circuit for performing a method comprising: creating,by an operating system on a computer system configured to supporttransactional execution mode processing, a start of a transactionalregion portion of a stream of program instructions, wherein the portionof the stream of program instructions in the transactional region is tobe executed as a transaction in transactional execution mode; inresponse to starting the transactional region in transactional executionmode: saving, by the operating system, a snapshot of a system stateinformation, executing, by the operating system, one or moreinstructions in the portion of the stream of program instructions as atransaction; and creating, by the operating system, an end of thetransactional region portion of the stream of program instructions; inresponse to ending execution of the transactional region in transactionexecution mode: committing, by the operating system, store data of thetransaction to memory; and responsive to a transient hardware failureaffecting a program resource required by one or more instructions in thetransactional region portion of the stream of program instructionsexecuting as a transaction in transactional execution mode: aborting, bythe operating system, the transaction without notifying a computersoftware application that initiated the stream of program instructions;and re-executing, by the operating system, the transactional regionportion of the stream of program instructions as a transaction intransactional execution mode, based on the saved snapshot of the systemstate information.
 7. The computer program product according to claim 6,wherein responsive to the transient hardware failure affecting theprogram resource required by the one or more instructions in thetransactional region portion of the stream of program instructionsexecuting as a transaction in transactional execution mode furthercomprises: returning, by the operating system, a specialized abort codewith the abort for identifying the transient hardware failure.
 8. Thecomputer program product according to claim 6, wherein responsive to thetransient hardware failure affecting the program resource required bythe one or more instructions in the transactional region portion of thestream of program instructions executing as a transaction intransactional execution mode further comprises: creating, by theoperating system, a hardware interrupt, the interrupt handled by one offirmware or privileged software; and providing, by the operating system,failure information.
 9. The computer program product according to claim8, further comprising: passing control to a hardware event handlerthrough event based branching.
 10. The computer program productaccording to claim 6, wherein ending execution of the transactionalregion in transaction execution mode further comprises: responsive to anext portion of the stream of program instructions follows the createdend of the transactional region portion of the stream of programinstructions, automatically creating, by the operating system, a startof a second transactional region of the next portion of the stream ofprogram instructions.
 11. The computer program product according toclaim 6, wherein re-executing, by the operating system, thetransactional region portion of the stream of program instructions as atransaction executing in transactional execution mode, based on thesaved snapshot of the system state information is further based on oneor more of: determining, by the operating system, the transient hardwarefailure affected the program resource that is in the saved snapshot ofthe system state information, and determining, by the operating system,the transient hardware failure affected the program resource that is notrequired as input to the re-executed transactional region portion of thestream of program instructions.
 12. A computer system for autonomousrecovery from a transient hardware failure by executing each portion ofa stream of program instructions as a transaction, the computer systemcomprising: a memory; and a processor in communication with the memory,wherein the computer system is configured to perform a method, saidmethod comprising: creating, by an operating system on a computer systemconfigured to support transactional execution mode processing, a startof a transactional region portion of a stream of program instructions,wherein the portion of the stream of program instructions in thetransactional region is to be executed as a transaction in transactionalexecution mode; in response to starting the transactional region intransactional execution mode: saving, by the operating system, asnapshot of a system state information, executing, by the operatingsystem, one or more instructions in the portion of the stream of programinstructions as a transaction; and creating, by the operating system, anend of the transactional region portion of the stream of programinstructions; in response to ending execution of the transactionalregion in transaction execution mode: committing, by the operatingsystem, store data of the transaction to memory; and responsive to atransient hardware failure affecting a program resource required by oneor more instructions in the transactional region portion of the streamof program instructions executing as a transaction in transactionalexecution mode: aborting, by the operating system, the transactionwithout notifying a computer software application that initiated thestream of program instructions; and re-executing, by the operatingsystem, the transactional region portion of the stream of programinstructions as a transaction in transactional execution mode, based onthe saved snapshot of the system state information.
 13. The computersystem according to claim 12, wherein creating, by the operating system,an end of the transactional region portion of the stream of programinstructions is based on any one of: execution of an instruction in thestream of program instructions that is an end of transaction point ofthe stream of program instructions; and execution of an end-mode testpoint parameter instruction, the execution of the end-mode test pointparameter instruction setting parameters used by the computer system todetermine the end of the transactional region portion in the stream ofprogram instructions.
 14. The computer system according to claim 12,wherein responsive to the transient hardware failure affecting theprogram resource required by the one or more instructions in thetransactional region portion of the stream of program instructionsexecuting as a transaction in transactional execution mode furthercomprises: returning, by the operating system, a specialized abort codewith the abort identifying the transient hardware failure.
 15. Thecomputer system according to claim 12, wherein responsive to thetransient hardware failure affecting the program resource required bythe one or more instructions in the transactional region portion of thestream of program instructions executing as a transaction intransactional execution mode further comprises: creating, by theoperating system, a hardware interrupt, the interrupt handled by one offirmware or privileged software; and providing, by the operating system,failure information.
 16. The computer system according to claim 15,further comprising: passing control to a hardware event handler throughevent based branching.
 17. The computer system according to claim 12,wherein re-executing the transactional region portion of the stream ofprogram instructions as a transaction in transactional execution modeoccurs on an alternate processor thread.
 18. The computer systemaccording to claim 12, wherein ending execution of the transactionalregion in transaction execution mode further comprises: responsive to anext portion of the stream of program instructions follows the createdend of the transactional region portion of the stream of programinstructions, automatically creating, by the operating system, a startof a second transactional region of the next portion of the stream ofprogram instructions.
 19. The computer system according to claim 18,wherein a number of instructions in the stream of program instructionsafter the created end of the transactional region portion are executednon-transactionally before automatically creating the start of thesecond transactional region of the next portion of the stream of programinstructions.
 20. The computer system according to claim 12, whereinre-executing, by the operating system, the transactional region portionof the stream of program instructions as a transaction executing intransactional execution mode, based on the saved snapshot of the systemstate information is further based on one or more of: determining, bythe operating system, the transient hardware failure affected theprogram resource that is in the saved snapshot of the system stateinformation, and determining, by the operating system, the transienthardware failure affected the program resource that is not required asinput to the re-executed transactional region portion of the stream ofprogram instructions.